Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in Hanover. Not only did Sternath get the obvious stunner of two Prokofiev sonatas in the first half; he also had all the best tunes and phrases as the right-hand man, so to speak, in Shostakovich’s piano arrangement of his towering Tenth Symphony. The best, as in absolutely no holds barred, came at the very end.

Vox Feminae: music by Barbara Strozzi, Antonia Bemba,  Hieryonymus Kapsberger... Les Kapsber’girls/Albane Imbs (Alpha)

The BBC Philharmonic took its Saturday night audience on a journey into French sonic luxuriance – in reverse order of historical formation, beginning with Duruflé, continuing with Chausson and ending with Saint-Saëns. It was conducted by Geoffrey Paterson and featured Dame Sarah Connolly as mezzo-soprano soloist, neither of them the artists originally announced, but 100 per cent good value as their substitutes. 

On paper, it was a standard programme with no stars to explain how this came to be a sellout concert. But packed it was, an audience of all ages which sat with concentrated awe through the spellbinding slow movement of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto and went wild at the end of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Both works were groundbreaking at the time, sounding absolutely fresh here with the passion and precision awesomely well balanced by conductor Lio Kuokman.

Forget, for a moment, the legend and the lustre. If you knew nothing about Riccardo Muti’s half-century of history with Verdi’s Messa da Requiem for the writer-patriot Alessandro Manzoni – he first gave it with the Philharmonia back in 1974 – and came fresh to this conductor with this work, would it shake the soul? On the evidence of the 83-year-old maestro’s performance with the same orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall last night, the answer would have to be a resonant affirmative.

Mariam Batsashvili, the young virtuosa pianist from Georgia, is a star. No doubt about that. Trained at the Liszt Academy in Weimar and winner of the International Franz Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in that city in 2015, she should know something about how to play Liszt’s music.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more closely associated with Bach and Handel, conducted the UK premiere of a work by Peter Eötvös, that darling of the avant-garde.

Donizetti: Songs Vols. 3 & 4 Michael Spyres (tenor), Carlo Rizzi (piano) – Vol. 3, Marie-Nicole Lemieux (mezzo-soprano), Giulio Zappa (piano) – Vol. 4. (Opera Rara)

Imagine if Bach had set Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s allegory of Beauty breaking free from Pleasure with the guidance of Time and Enlightenment: he’d probably have hit the spiritual highs. The 21-year-old Handel, at least as this multifaceted performance so vigorously and poetically argued, plumps for hedonistic delights.

Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite, maybe, with enough bold textures to recall wandering attentions. We needed less of this, and more of the Duke Ellington selections superbly played by the 15-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in the first half.