Jeremy Denk, Wigmore Hall

JEREMY DENK, WIGMORE HALL Panorama of musical history reveals surprising connections

Panorama of musical history reveals surprising connections

Medieval to Modern – Jeremy Denk’s Wigmore Hall recital took us on a whistle-stop tour of Western music, beginning with Machaut in the mid-14th century and ending with Ligeti at the end of the 20th. The programme was made up of 25 short works, each by a different composer and arranged in broadly chronological order, resulting in a series of startling contrasts, but punctuated with equally surprising, and often very revealing, continuities.

theartsdesk at the D-Marin Festival: Turkish poetry in music, Bach at sunrise

Open-air adventures from an epic Turkish oratorio to solo strings by the sea

Istanbul six weeks before the failed coup, the south-west coast of Turkey six weeks after: what's the difference? None that I could see; once past the Turkish Airlines flights, with literature and screen full of the "People's Victory", there was no sign of it at the D-Marin Classical Music Festival on the Bodrum peninsula, centred around the marina in Turgutreis, a 45-minute drive along a very built-up coastline from once-quiet Bodrum.

Prom 63: B Minor Mass, Les Arts Florissants, Christie

A stylish B Minor that never quite reached transcendence

The BBC Proms is the largest classical music festival in the world – an event whose ambition, accessibility and breadth wouldn’t be possible without the Royal Albert Hall and its capacity of well over 5,000 people. But the building that makes this festival possible, that provides the space for the hundreds of Prommers who fill the arena each evening, is also its biggest curse. Its unwieldy, awkward acoustic is a problem that must be faced and resolved every night, and when it comes to Early Music, it’s a resolution that’s partial at best.

Prom 60: Gerhaher, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Jordan

PROM 60: GUSTAV MAHLER JUGENDORCHESTER Young Europeans glow in Bruckner 9

Young Europeans glow, but a usually great baritone disappoints

There is no reason why young musicians shouldn't make something special out of mature thoughts on mortality. Nor is the Albert Hall problematic when it comes to haloing intimate Bach as finely as it does massive Bruckner. The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra glowed in both the large scale and the small last night. Any shortcomings were in senior hands and hearts - possibly those of a usually great conductor, Philippe Jordan, more likely the infirm purpose of his composer, Bruckner. The most surprising disappointment of all came from that most prized of baritones, Christian Gerhaher.

Cottier Chamber Project 2016, Glasgow

COTTIER CHAMBER PROJECT 2016, GLASGOW Glasgow's frenetic pre-summer classical bash just gets bigger and better

Glasgow's frenetic pre-summer classical bash just gets bigger and better

It should have been a complete disaster. Not announcing your festival’s programme until barely a week before it started ought to have guaranteed that nobody knew about it – no press, no audiences, other plans made, other things booked.

But still they came. It’s testament to the Cottier Chamber Project’s now firmly established place in Scotland’s summer musical life – this is its sixth year – that even keeping audiences in the dark as to what was planned didn’t deter them.

Multi-Story Orchestra, Stark, Spitalfields Music Summer Festival

MULTI-STORY ORCHESTRA, STARK, SPITALFIELDS MUSIC SUMMER FESTIVAL Relics brought to life in the Museum of Childhood

Relics brought to life in the Museum of Childhood

Crazy-faced space-hopper, playmobil fireman, marble run: toys from my own childhood, staring at me now from out of glass cases, alongside an 18th century marionette, thread-bare rocking horses and a headless Georgian doll. This concert in the Museum of Childhood could have been a wallow in nostalgia. Instead, with their usual brand of ingenuity, the Multi-Story Orchestra kindled musical artefacts into vibrant life.

Bach Cantatas and Magnificat, Bach Collegium Japan, Suzuki, Saffron Hall

Fine, benign church music by the greatest of them all in the right acoustic

“The rests, the silences in Bach are never for nothing,” I once heard the Dutch cellist and baroque specialist Anner Bylsma telling a student in a masterclass. “You jump up from them, you reach higher.” Hearing the Bach Collegium Japan on Sunday night kept bringing those phrases to mind, because the listener in the acoustic of Saffron Hall really does get to hear this music, so delicately played, emerging again and again from silence. 

Bach B Minor Mass, Bach Collegium Japan, Suzuki, Barbican

BACH B MINOR MASS, BACH COLLEGIUM JAPAN, SUZUKI, BARBICAN Clarity, colour and detail from Japanese Bach specialists

Clarity, colour and detail from Japanese Bach specialists

Masaaki Suzuki’s reputation precedes him. His recordings of Bach’s choral works with Bach Collegium Japan, the group he founded in 1990, have been arguably the finest of recent decades. But visits to the West, and especially to London, are rare, so this evening’s concert offered a valuable opportunity to find out what the dynamics are within the ensemble, and how they achieve such impressive results on disc.