“Bon soir, good evening! Nice to see you! To see you...” Four years after bidding an emotional farewell to the Usher Hall, the Gallic charmer is back, maybe slightly stouter, with a tinge of grey in a new beard, the great mop of curly red hair as unruly as ever. And that accent! As the anecdotes flow, stout middle-aged Edinburgers swoon as they imagine themselves drinking pastis on the Boulevard St Germain in the spring sunshine.

The earliest film collected here, 1963’s Elgar, stands up incredibly well. Some of its quirks were imposed from above: fledgling director Ken Russell was initially employed by the BBC’s Talks Department and was discouraged from using actors in his documentaries. So Elgar is packed full of reconstructions of scenes from the composer’s life, though the actors never speak and there are no close ups.

Last night’s concert at the Barbican focused on the theme of dreams and night-time, centred around the UK premiere of Dream of the Song by George Benjamin. But the one piece on the programme that did not fit with the theme stole the show. Stravinsky’s American-period masterpiece Symphony in Three Movements supplied the energy and rhythmic impetus lacking elsewhere.

Renée Fleming recently announced her imminent retirement from the opera stage. But she has no plans to stop performing, and will instead devote her time to recitals and concerts. Yesterday’s excellent performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra bodes well for her new career focus. And she’s not one to rest on her laurels, here giving UK premieres of two new works written for her voice, ever the adventurous artist, always playing to her strengths.

Debussy: Starry Night – Préludes Book 1 and Other Works Michael Lewin (piano) (Sono Luminus)

It was a simple yet beautifully elegant way for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to kick off its 2016 chamber concerts: a recital for flute, viola and harp, with Debussy’s beguiling Sonata as the centrepiece, and other contrasting music for the same trio orbiting around it.

As pianist Beatrice Rana ran up the final bars of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, the conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla turned to her soloist and simply beamed. As well she might. Rana is an artist whose advance publicity belies the seriousness and selflessness of her playing. Her Schumann didn’t concern itself with flashy effects (though there were some daring variations of tempo) or even, particularly, beauty of tone (though the iridescent glow she gave to the little cascades of chords that link the Intermezzo to the finale showed that she commands an impressive palette).

Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is a drama played out in shadow. Shine too bright, too unyielding a directorial light on it, and the delicate dramatic fabric – all unspokens and unspeakables – frays into air. Just over a year ago, director David Edwards and the Philharmonia Orchestra gave us a semi-staging of exquisitely allusive simplicity, leaving the music to fill the gaps between symbol and emotion.

What dancemaker wouldn't want to tackle Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at some point? Just as the Stravinsky score changed music, the original Ballets Russes production changed dance - and was then, conveniently, so completely forgotten that no master-text exists. Everyone is free to take the Stravinsky and run. Or rather, dance: as Michael Clark has observed, one of Sacre's gifts to a choreographer is the in-built necessity of dance to the scenario, in which a victim is chosen by a crowd and forced to dance to his or her death.

“People think when a person becomes old, he has to become serene,” declared that great pianist Claudio Arrau in his mid-seventies. “That’s absurd. The expressive intensity is, I feel, much stronger, much more concentrated in my playing than years ago.” You could argue the same for Stephen Kovacevich at his 75^th birthday concert, though in the case of Schubert’s final, B flat Piano Sonata, was it entirely intensity that had him racing through a work that, back in 1982, he took about 10 minutes longer over, albeit with repeats?