In the beginning, 38 years ago, came a career-making Mahler Third Symphony for Esa-Pekka Salonen in his first concert with the Philharmonia. Reassembling that vast epic wouldn't be possible under present circumstances.

Seven months might just about be enough time to have digested the deep and intense offerings of the Second Ragged Music Festival before moving on to more soul-shattering and transcendence in the third. That there hasn’t been a year between the two weekends - the October one came top of my "Best of 2020" choice - is due to the fact that renovation work has already started on the hugely atmospheric and treasurable Ragged School Museum in Mile End, and the next stage will entail a long lockdown.

Last Easter, viewing options were limited: no-one who saw it will forget a version of Bach’s St John Passion from the church where it was first performed in 1724, Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, with an idiosyncratic tenor taking all the parts other than the chorales – live from a quintet and streamed in from around the world – and accompanied only by organ/harpsichord and percussion. But the real thing has been so longed for.

A year into the pandemic, it is hard to imagine anybody relishing the prosect of Lenten austerity. But the liturgical calendar trundles on, and here we are in Holy Week. The aptly named Tenebrae Choir, under conductor Nigel Short here offer a traditional Lent programme, mostly solemn but with a few lighter numbers.

Bach: St Matthew Passion Gaechinger Cantorey/Hans-Christoph Rademann (Accentus)

Bach: The English Suites Paolo Zanzu (harpsichord) (Musica Ficta)

The Way of Light – The Music of Nigel Hess (Orchid Classics)

Aside from the happy accident of longevity, something that set Bach and Handel and Telemann apart from their contemporaries was fluency. I’m speaking here of musical rather than verbal tongues: the least polyglot of them was Bach, with his command of four languages, German, Latin, French and Italian, in decreasing degrees of facility. While Handel criss-crossed Europe, Bach and Telemann anchored themselves in small areas of central and northern Germany respectively.

Bach: Sonatas for recorder, harpsichord and viola da gamba Michala Petri (recorder), Hille Perl (viola da gamba), Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord) (OUR Recordings)

Amid madness, fear and death, there is still an oasis in the music of Bach - and Bach played by András Schiff in the Wigmore Hall is a special type of haven. Normally one can’t get in to those concerts because they are instantly sold out, even though he usually does each one twice. Instead, this performance was beamed live into our own computers wherever we may be, and after the past few days, my goodness, we needed it.