When Riccardo Chailly (b 1953) left the Royal Concertgebouw for the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Richard Morrison said it was as if Bill Gates had ditched Microsoft for Aeroflot. The Gewandhaus has since become one of the lustiest of orchestral beasts in the world. Chailly and his orchestra make a rare appearance at the Barbican next Thursday and like all his previous visits it's likely to be a pretty unmissable event.

As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country. Cuts in state subsidy do not end quality. They improve it.

If you were one of the world's top soloists but with a limited concerto stock - as woodwind players' tend to be - wouldn't you find it more rewarding to work as a principal in the orchestral ranks? That's the ideal, surely, but few carry it out in practice. Nicholas Daniel, the beefiest-sounding oboist to appear on the scene since the great Maurice Bourgue, is one who does. Last night he not only shone in the bright ensemble of Beethoven's Second Symphony; he also scored a triumph with a tough new gift to him and the Britten Sinfonia, James MacMillan's latest teeming-with-life concerto.

Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is a glorious collusion of intellect and fantasy. Her recitals are meticulously planned but seemingly unexpected with chosen pieces impacting upon each other in ways one might not have imagined. Three keyboard giants – Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin – were the meat of this recital with not an incidental or superfluous note to be found anywhere.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and his dauntless band of Philharmonia players have been wrestling with heroes. After a celebration of Wagner's Tristan, the legend-making shifted further north last night. Here was Sibelius first as the plain-singing, well-loved bard of Finnish endurance and then as the startlingly original creator of a musical alter ego in the shape of mythical adventurer Lemminkäinen. Salonen's edge-of-seat interpretation made two things startlingly clear: that the four movements of the misnamed Lemminkäinen Suite can constitute as radical a symphony as any of Sibelius's numbered seven, and that this surging orchestral tidal wave is as iconoclastic a work in its own rugged way as Wagner's opera.

"It is a curious tale. I have it written in faded ink, a woman's hand, governess to two children, long ago..." So begins Benjamin Britten's operatic re-imagining of Henry James's ghostly chiller The Turn of the Screw. Oscar Wilde called it "a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" but how are we supposed to interpret it? In a remote country house, a governess fights to protect two children from menacing spirits. But are these spirits real or imagined?

Do paws get any mightier than Llŷr Williams's? When not crashing down onto the Wigmore Hall Steinway like a ton of singing bricks, they were digging deep, like strong, nifty moles, foraging for the contrapuntal melodies that lay beneath the topsoil. Williams was made to tackle the beefy German classics on this programme.

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

One Proms blockbuster effortlessly reached its goal last night when Paul Lewis crowned his Beethoven piano concertos series with a diamantine "Emperor". Two more suggested themselves in a challenging quartet of big works programmed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's brilliant music director Stéphane Denève. I now hunger for concert performances here conducted by Denève of Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini and James MacMillan's The Sacrifice. On the evidence of the late-night Prom's box of delights, I even uncharacteristically want to hear all of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso with Philippe Jaroussky and Marie-Nicole Lemieux as the stars.

One Proms blockbuster effortlessly reached its goal last night when Paul Lewis crowned his Beethoven piano concertos series with a diamantine "Emperor". Two more suggested themselves in a challenging quartet of big works programmed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's brilliant music director Stéphane Denève. I now hunger for concert performances here conducted by Denève of Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini and James MacMillan's The Sacrifice. On the evidence of the late-night Prom's box of delights, I even uncharacteristically want to hear all of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso with Philippe Jaroussky and Marie-Nicole Lemieux as the stars.

Call me a paradoxically wary old Mahler nut, but I reckon that given 24 months of anniversary overkill, it might keep things fresh to catch each of the symphonies live no more than once a year. So, having heard an Everest of a First Symphony from Abbado in Lucerne last August, I thought Rattle's might be the team likeliest to do this far-from-beginner's symphony similar justice. Did its Proms Mahler One compare well with the Swiss festival love-in?