Last night at the Royal Ballet was, emphatically, laser-free. The combination of Afternoon of a Faun (1953) and In the Night (1970) by the great American choreographer Jerome Robbins, with a repeat of Kenneth MacMillan's 1965 Song of the Earth, performed earlier this season in a different triple bill, is your archetypical safe bet, presumably calculated to soothe any ruffles that might have been caused by Wayne McGregor's ambitious Virginia Woolf opus. The Royal Ballet ought to have been able to do these mid-century classics standing on its collective head.

Violinists either fathom the elusive heart and soul of Elgar’s music or miss the mark completely. Canadian James Ehnes, one of the most cultured soloists on the scene today, is the only one I’ve heard since Nigel Kennedy to make the Violin Concerto work in concert, in an equally rare total partnership with Elgarian supreme Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia. Last night he found the same emotional core in the Violin Sonata at the end of a colossal programme with a no less extraordinary but much less widely known companion, the American pianist Andrew Armstrong.

It took just two bars of Debussy's La plus que lente for Stephen Hough to transport the entire Royal Festival Hall to Paris. The nearest thing the French composer ever wrote to a café waltz – inspired by a gypsy band in a local hotel – this bewitching, louche yet elusive little piece might in other hands make a more suitable encore than opener.

“I need to get a new gimmick.” Joyce DiDonato hobbled her way onto Milton Court’s stage last night, warning her audience to expect a seated performance owing to a sprained ankle. It was just six years ago she famously broke her leg during a performance of Rossini’s Il Barbiere at Covent Garden, but now, as then, she continued with no obvious dimming of intensity or focus.

In an operatic world in which the director is an increasingly despotic king, it’s good to be reminded that, sometimes, not staging an opera is the most radical reading of all. No elaborate set or concept dominated David Edwards’s one-off Pelléas et Mélisande at the Royal Festival Hall last night. There were just suggestions, allusions, echoes. And a cast – what a cast – that came close to perfection.

Major change is afoot at the Liverpool Philharmonic. The new season has just opened as Philharmonic Hall has been undergoing a major refurbishment and earlier concerts during the autumn were held in the gargantuan acoustics of both cathedrals, where hearing the work being performed is difficult and where comfort for the listener comes at a premium.

You know what to expect from a standard programme of masterpieces like this, led by two great performers in careful control of their repertoire, and those expectations are never going to be disappointed. You’re not going to hear the kind of new-sound Brahms side by side with the more recent end of the German musical tradition – Zimmermann, say, or Henze; that’s the provenance of a fresh thinker like Vladimir Jurowski.

Daniil Trifonov, 23, has shot to prominence as one of the hottest pianistic properties of the moment. With multiple competition wins behind him, including the Tchaikovsky in his native Russia, plus a recording contract with DG and a frenetic globe-trotting schedule, he is now a very busy young man. Last night’s London appearance was his recital debut at the Royal Festival Hall, a venue only accorded to the biggest names in the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, the new season of which he was opening.

On paper this was an interesting programme. The Edinburgh Festival traditionally opens with a major choral work, but while the international audience would probably be happy with endlessly recycled requiems and masses, festival directors have often felt obliged to venture into more challenging territory. So for last night’s opening concert the chorus had prominent roles in two separate works on either side of the interval: Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, and Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien.

Jorge Grundman: A Mortuis Resurgere Susana Cordón (soprano), Brodsky Quartet (Chandos)