As a generalist (or dilettante) who writes about world, jazz, pop and classical music, I have no doubt that 10 years ago Andreas Scholl was one of the great voices of the planet alongside names like Abida Parveen from Pakistan and Caetano Veloso from Brazil, a vocal Sun King. From an early age he had had success upon success, audiences gave him huge standing ovations, women swooned over him (OK – slightly older women like my mum, who followed him around Europe).

If you’re going to make a programme about the Rococo, that ornate and playful decorative arts movement that began in France at the start of the 18^th century and flourished under the French king Louis XV, naturally you’d want to start in Bavaria. Or perhaps not. But Waldemar Januszczak does, heading off with his bag-on-a-stick and his lolloping gait in the nature of a weary pilgrim to visit a German Rococo splendour or two in stone and pastel-coloured stucco. 

You really think they’d have learned by now. Any operatic vow to sacrifice the next living creature you see in return for salvation will reliably end up with the luckless suppliant faced with their lover/son/spouse. For those who haven’t already learned this handy lesson from Mozart’s Idomeneo, there’s Handel’s Jephtha. Its skeletal (and frankly rather daft) plot matters little, however. It’s the scaffolding for some of the composer’s most glorious oratorio writing, which last night was given the full (and often equally glorious) Sixteen treatment.

Last night’s Mozart and Haydn concert at the Barbican was billed as Magdalena Kožená with Les Violons du Roy. In practice it actually turned out to be Les Violons du Roy with Magdalena Kožená, which (barring a few die-hard fans of the Czech mezzo) was surely preferable for all concerned.

It's a considerable irony that a musician as dedicated and as serious as pianist/conductor Christian Zacharias should suddenly, at the age of 63, gain bragging rights on Youtube (see next page). There wasn't really that much he could do about it. It happened last October. A mobile phone went off as he was directing a Haydn concerto from the keyboard in Sweden. You can see his silent but intense frustration as he stops playing. “Don't answer,” he says. He waits until the loud noise of the moble phone stops, and gets back to playing.

The great Marilyn Horne used to joke that she was going to release an album entitled “Chestnuts for Chest Nuts”. She never did, but that leaves the door wide open for Sonia Prina whose dark, thrillingly low sound marks her out as the real deal, a genuine contralto. But the excitement of Prina in performance isn’t just about her extraordinary skill at using her unusual range.

Not every Yuletide fixture need be commercial and routine. Certainly St John’s annual Christmas Festival packs them in, but why wouldn’t it when the voices for the last two events, backed up by no less than the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are the best you could possibly find for the great monuments of Handel and Bach?

Nothing tests small-hall acoustics better than that most exuberant of holies, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass. After one of the year’s big disappointments, the blowsy sound coming from chamber ensembles in the Barbican/Guildhall School’s new Milton Court –  a surprise miscalculation from Arup acousticians -  it seemed imperative to get back to Kings Place’s Hall One, which feels bigger but is some 200 seats smaller (420 to Milton Court’s 608). And oh, the clarion cries of the 32 young Cambridge choral singers!

There’s a reason why many people think Handel and, particularly his Messiah, is dull. Relatively easy to play, his music is incredibly difficult to perform well. Take this Temple Winter Festival outing with choral expert David Hill conducting the immensely skilled BBC Singers who can, and largely do, sing everything; four soloists all banishing grandiose, wobbly vibrato from days of yore; and the accomplished St James’s Baroque. There was nothing wrong with the performance... Unless, that is, you wanted the intensity, passion and, yes, the drama that Handel wrote.

The Georgians are in our marrow, and two of them in particular. The dawn of the age gave us Handel, who came over from Hanover with George I. Then at the sunset came the ever-exalted Jane Austen, who dedicated Emma in mock deference to the bloated Prince Regent. And in between there are all those elegant terraces in dark-brown brick, desirable survivors of the Industrial Revolution and the Luftwaffe.