Timo Andres: Home Stretch Timo Andres (piano), Metropolis Ensemble/Andrew Cyr (Nonesuch)

Retrieving buried rarities, many even by famous composers, is the cornerstone of the Buxton Festival, now in its 35th year. This time around, artistic director Stephen Barlow has plucked out a pair of 19th-century French comic operas by Saint-Saëns and Gounod, coupling them in a double bill to kick-start the Festival.

Once in a blue moon, the judges would seem to have got it wrong.  I can think only of 2001, when stunning Latvian mezzo Elina Garanča failed to win the coveted goblet but has since gone on to deserved fame as one of the top half-dozen singers on the international stage today. This year, though, it was business as usual: the panel lit up by a gracious Dame Kiri, three of the singers who didn’t make it to the final,sound telly opera trouper Mary King and I all agreed that regal American with a twinkle Jamie Barton deserved the palm.

The Marriage of Figaro is so much a part of Glyndebourne’s history that it’s sometimes hard to recall the details of this or that production. Michael Grandage’s current staging, though, will be easily remembered for its strong characteristics, both good and bad: for Christopher Oram’s marvellous Alhambra sets, for the brilliance and occasional vulgarity of Grandage’s direction, for its perfection of movement and timing and its almost total obliteration of the social distinctions on which the plot hinges.

In sunshineand bright blue skies there can be few places more green and pleasant than Wormsley Park. Garsington Opera has found a happy home there, with this being its third season in its sleekly rectilinear big top at the Getty family’s Buckinghamshire estate.

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake asked the tiger. One might have asked the same question of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, with Mozart’s G major Piano Concerto, K.453, as the lamb, in this hyper-diverse Birmingham concert. The image of divine simplicity was in the delicate hands of Mitsuko Uchida, whose Mozart resisted every striped temptation that Andris Nelsons and the CBSO threw in her path.

In its ebbs, flows and final grand flourishing, the career of Sir Colin Davis was reminiscent of some of the great musical masterpieces with which he became closely identified. From Mozart to Tippett, Berlioz to Beethoven and Sibelius, Davis proved himself one of the major international conductors of the post-war era. If in his earlier years he acquired a reputation for being fractious and confrontational with his musicians, the Davis of the last three decades was wise and unruffled, finding in music an almost transcendental refuge.

Mahler: Symphony no 9 Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra/Gustavo Dudamel (DG)

You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.

It’s not that Bernard Haitink’s tempos are universally slow, it’s just that they often feel that way. When it works the music can be magisterial, immense, but when it doesn’t you find yourself chafing against such unyielding allegiance to restraint. Last night we saw both sides of the veteran conductor, but a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K453 like the one he conjured with Maria João Pires and the London Symphony Orchestra can banish the memory of any orchestral strife with the merest rococo flourish of its wrist.