Viennese night in Glasgow’s Candleriggs was hardly going to be a simple matter of waltzes and polkas. True, its curtain-raiser was a Blue Danube with red blood in its veins rather than the anodyne river water of this year’s New Year concert from Austria’s capital; one would expect no less from Donald Runnicles after the refined but anaemic Franz Welser-Möst.

Listening to a recording can never replace the joys of live performance. But if you don’t live in London, opportunities to explore quirky new repertoire can be thin on the ground. CDs most often excel as introductions to composers and works that you’ve never heard before. We’ve all experienced those small moments of rapture when a previously unknown piece bowls you over. You immediately skip back to replay it, usually at higher volume, before you hassle your friends and family to listen too.

Why is music? A child’s question, a great question. One answered by Evgeny Kissin’s piano recital at London’s Barbican Centre last night, where you might want to engage analysis and come up later with answers but what happened was that you left the concert hall feeling more alive, emotions retooled, spirit lightened, range widened. Music is because. Why else would Beethoven compose 32 piano sonatas? What possible purpose of Haydn to write 62 of them? Because.

Beethoven: Piano Concertos 1 and 3 Leif Ove Andsnes/Mahler Chamber Orchestra (Sony)

Beethoven: Symphonies nos 5 & 7 Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)

The vibrant Elias String Quartet are 14 years young, well established, and well respected on the international scene. Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and recipients of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2010, they are at that major crossroads in any quartet's life when they embark upon a complete cycle of the Beethoven Quartets. Unusually the quartet have decided to chronicle their preparation and progress through a revealing website.

It’s Beethoven all right, but not as you know him. The scowl is there, and the broad heroic shoulders too, but the iconic tousled hair is glowing a rather unexpected shade of orange. A purple cloak sweeps down to the floor, setting off a jaunty pair of Elton John-style glasses and a leopard-print waistcoat.

Over the next four seasons the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will be embarking upon a “Beethoven Journey” that will clock up 150 performances in 55 cities all over the world. At the heart of this expedition will sit the five Beethoven Concertos and Choral Fantasia all of which will be committed to disc by Sony Classical in recordings made in Prague and featuring the Mahler Chamber Orchestra directed from the keyboard by Andsnes.

Fans of the Leeds International Piano Competition argue that this triennial event, now in its 49^th year, has done more to raise the city’s profile than any other local institution. Supporters of Leeds United would doubtless disagree, but Dame Fanny Waterman’s long-running contest has grown into an influential, internationally renowned affair. Dame Janet Baker awards the prizes. Lang Lang is now the competition’s Global Ambassador along with Honorary Ambassador Aung San Suu Kyi. Waterman, now an improbably spritely 91, is still very much in control of proceedings.

You’ve never seen so many people at a Prom, thousands of them packed into every space of the Albert Hall inside, while outside a 100-metre line of hopefuls queued in vain to stand in a pit where a small cat couldn’t have been added. But then this was a luxury Prom: with the Vienna Philharmonic and two musicians of golden integrity and sensitivity, lifetime members of the high table, the pianist Murray Perahia and the conductor Bernard Haitink playing two works born in Vienna.