If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in recent years have involved Brahms, a composer I love more the older I get: the Second, A major, Piano Quartet, much less often heard than No. 1, at the 2018 Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, and, last Friday, his First String Quartet from the Cuarteto Casals, also new to me, in an airy room looking out on Dublin’s Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.

There was a neat conjunction of commemorations to this concert, the most obvious one being the fact that that 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, so it’s completely appropriate the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to end its season with a concert of his music. More than that, however, the composer himself heard this very orchestra (then called the Scottish National Orchestra) play his Festive Overture in the Usher Hall in 1962, during one of Lord Harewood’s Edinburgh Festivals. 

Antal Doráti in London: The Mercury Masters Vol. 1 (Decca Eloquence)

James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a spectrum of pieces which brim with wit and inventiveness. This lunchtime concert with violinist Anthony Marwood was a sheer joy, as they together traversed a range of style and tone, richly entertaining a very decent Bank Holiday crowd in the Wigmore Hall.

"How long is Wagner’s Ring Cycle?" That’s not the opening to a joke, it’s a genuine question asked by a friend who I’d met up with before heading to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall to hear the Royal Scottish National Orchestra perform "Wagner’s Ring Symphony". His question is one I really don’t know how to answer: technically it’s 15 hours, but does a cycle ever really end? Is a piece of string as long as the ties that bind? How long would it take to wrap up the whole world?

Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern imagination that you can always discover something new, especially given the intense hard work on detail of Antonio Pappano and what is now very much “his” London Symphony Orchestra. They and Lisa Batiashvili also helped to keep Szymanowski’s hothouse First Violin Concerto in focus, too.

Manchester Camerata spent eight years performing and recording a complete edition of Mozart’s piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist, together with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, and inevitably there was the question: what next?

Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two established favourites from big names of the 20^th century plus a new-to-me piece by a forgotten figure worthy of re-discovery.

Brahms: Lieder Christian Gerhaher (baritone), Gerold Huber (piano) (Sony)

It was a daring idea to mark Ravel’s 150th birthday year with a single concert packing in all his works for solo piano. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet knows them by heart, has bags of charisma and energy, so why not? I could give more than one reason, but the main problem was that while Bavouzet perfectly embodied Scarbo, the monster-Puck of Gaspard de la nuit, and other nocturnal flitters, he seemed careless with Undine and her watery companions, of which there were many.