Christian Gerhaher is a classy recitalist. His stage manner is debonair, his tailoring immaculate (although his hair can be unruly). His artistry focuses on key vocal virtues: directness of expression and beauty of tone. In this evening’s recital, an adventurous programme that switched between the Classical era and the Modern, that proved as valuable a combination in Schoenberg as it did in Beethoven.

London foists hard choices on concertgoers. Over at St John's Smith Square last night Nikolai Demidenko was giving a high-profile recital of Brahms and Prokofiev. But since the Prokofiev CD which has had the most impact in recent years has been Freddy Kempf’s, of the Second and Third Piano Concertos with the Bergen Philharmonic and Andrew Litton, a half-full Cadogan Hall seemed like the right place to be, even without Prokofiev on the programme.

“Whatever happened to Stephen Bishop?” is not a question likely to be asked by followers of legendary pianism. Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 October 1940, the young talent took his stepfather’s name as his career was launched at the age of 11. Later he honoured his own father’s Croatian "Kovacevich", by appending it to the “Bishop”. Now it’s plain Kovacevich carved in the pantheon of similar yet unique sensibilities like those of Arrau, Pollini, Richter and Zimerman, alongside masterly exponents of mostly different repertoire like Martha Argerich.

After the broad, lyrical Shostakovich Tenth Symphony Andris Nelsons presented at the Proms last week, Vladimir Jurowski’s austere and unrelenting Eighth came as a shock. The two performances were equally fine, but at opposite ends of the Shostakovich spectrum. And the effect was intensified last night by a particularly terse programme, delivered with unrelenting intensity. No easy listening here, but plenty of raw emotion, and everything delivered with utter conviction and to the highest musical standards.

This was a performance laden with contradictions. After last weekend’s gargantuan Grande Messe des Morts, the standard issue Edinburgh Festival Chorus seemed much smaller – but not really small enough. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra was in its augmented format, almost up to symphony orchestra size, but playing in its increasingly popular authentic style with very little vibrato and the crunchy sound of natural brass instruments. Off to one side an organist struggled manfully to be heard on a chamber instrument no bigger than a celesta, and probably quieter.

There were two reasons why I didn’t return to the Albert Hall late on Friday night to hear Andras Schiff play Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The first was that one epic, Mahler’s Sixth in the stunning performance by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, needed properly digesting. The other was that at Easter I’d heard Jeremy Denk play the Goldbergs in Weimar, and I wanted that approach to resonate, too – dynamic, continuous, revelatory, in a very different way from how I know Schiff approaches Bach.

It’s been glorious to hear so much Bach at this year’s Proms – most of it after dark, and still more of it for the most intimate of forces. On paper, the Academy of Ancient Music and BBC Singers’ Late Night concert of Bach choral works didn’t quite have the mystique of Ibragimova’s Solo Sonatas and Partitas, Schiff’s Goldbergs or Ma’s Cello Suites. In practice, though, it was clever piece of programming that came into its own in its Friday night slot, sending people home to the weekend on the very highest of musical highs.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner has made great play for years with the idea that Beethoven’s Fifth is a revolutionary symphony in not only musical but political terms. Accordingly the first bars were a call to arms, taking no heed of a restless Proms audience, or the Albert Hall’s generous acoustic, ploughing into and then through the argument with the joyful fury of a class war demo breaking police lines.

What would you expect of an ensemble performance played from memory? That the odd lapse, entirely understandable over the span of a 40-minute symphony, would be more than offset, perhaps, by gains in intimacy and flexibility as the players could look around and phrase together, respond to a conductor’s nudge and turn on a sixpence.

So to the second leg of Leif Ove Andsnes's journey through the Beethoven concertos, and a distressingly underpopulated Royal Albert Hall. Perhaps the punters were put off by the wintry weather, or perhaps by the dread names of Schoenberg and Stravinsky on the bill. Either way, it is shocking that Andsnes’s wonderful playing should have been to anything other than a full house.