Sir Mark Elder’s zest for exploring fresh territory with the forces of the Hallé is unquenched even in his final season as music director. And who better to introduce the Stabat Mater of Rossini – a late flowering of the operatic wizard’s powers – than he, a champion of the rich and rare from operas past?

Last night saw two pieces of late 19^th century French choral music – one a hugely popular staple of choral societies around the world, the other a complete novelty, lost for a hundred years – brought together in fascinating juxtaposition by the French period-instrument orchestra Insula, under their founding conductor Laurence Equilbey.

The Fauré Requiem and Gounod’s Saint Francois d’Assise shared a radiant contemplation of death in music that is at once highly refined and yet utterly direct. They were both, in their different ways, exquisite.

Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 Bamberger Symphoniker/Jakub Hrůša (Accentus)

It was good of the EFG London Jazz Festival to support this concert and bring in a different audience from the one the LSO is used to. But how to define it? Jazz only briefly figured in works by Gary Carpenter, Bartók, Barber and Abel Selaocoe. The only category would seem to be All Things Vital and Dancing. Anyone who’d come just for the phenomenal South Africa-born cellist, singer and composer must have been riveted by the rest, too.

What a month, and what a day, for Michael Barenboim to bring the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble to London.

Chameleon among orchestras, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra hung up its habitual classical cloak in favour of an evening of 20th and 21st century minimalism, curated, presented, and conducted by the star percussionist Colin Currie.

“Underneath the abject willow/ Lover, sulk no more;/ Act from thought should quickly follow:/ What is thinking for?” In 1936, early in their tempestuous friendship, WH Auden wrote a poem for Benjamin Britten that urged the younger artist to pursue his passions – musical and erotic – and curb his fearful longing for comfort and safety.

“Let his words resound on high,” sings the choir in the final chorus of The Creation. In King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, it is hard not to want to look up, to admire the splendour of the largest fan vaulting anywhere in Europe. King’s truly is hard to beat as a setting in which to hear Haydn’s oratorio.

There was a good reason why Milton never added a Moderato, a “middle way”, to his masterly poems on mirth in bright day (L’Allegro) and more reflective pleasures by night (Il Penseroso), and a bad one why Handel allowed Charles Jennens to tack on his own ode to reason; neither poetry nor music should have much to do with pure intellect.

For the first half of this spellbinding recital, Maxim Vengerov chose three works framed by one of Romantic music’s most infamous and turbulent stories.