“Death doesn’t scare me at all,” said my friend Christopher Hitchens during our last telephone conversation. “After all, it’s the only certainty in life. Dying, however, scares me shitless”.

Was it worth taking a risk on a more humbly presented St John Passion in Dublin after the best St Matthew I’m ever likely to hear (from Peter Whelan and the Irish Baroque Ensemble in St Patrick’s Cathedral)?

The annual St Matthew Passion from the Dunedin Consort is one the most reliably beautiful jewels in Edinburgh’s musical year. They do the St John Passion much less frequently; in fact, this is the first time I’ve heard them do it, maybe motivated by its tercentenary this year.

Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is one of the most ineffable masterpieces of the 18^th century, its poignancy increased by the fact that the 26-year-old composer died shortly after writing it. A medieval meditation about Mary at the foot of the cross, it pitches two voices against a small orchestra, presented in a dramatised production this week by the young historical performance ensemble Figure.

There was a common factor in the superficially disparate elements of this Hallé concert, and it wasn’t just the fact that both soloist and conductor were female. It was an experience of the colours of the music and a sense of enjoyment of what orchestral music offers.

One of the many delightful discoveries in this dynamic, imaginative lunchtime concert was that Handel and Telemann had a thing for sending each other flowers. Not bouquets, but earthy bulbs and tubers, “I am insatiable where hyacinths and tulips are concerned, greedy for ranunculi, and especially for anenomes,” Telemann wrote.

For the second year in a row the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to share its platform in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall with the young musicians of St Mary's Music School. As RSNO chief executive Alistair Mackie pointed out in a short opening speech, the links between the two organisations run deep, as many players in the RSNO started their musical careers at St Mary's.

It began with the tolling of a lone bell and ended in a transcendent blaze of golden light. The UK premiere of James MacMillan’s Fiat Lux – first performed in Los Angeles in 2023 to mark the dedication of the dazzling crystalline Christ Cathedral, formerly a televangelist backdrop, as a Catholic church – was as exhilarating as it was meditative, an iridescent exploration of spirituality and sound.

Most concert promoters will tell you that contemporary music tends to be, to put it politely, a tricky sell, which is one of the reasons why it’s most often programmed alongside Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. A whole programme of the stuff tends to be box office suicide, so it’s almost never done.