Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious, catchy dance rhythms bounce away in the bass. There’s a hint of Louis Andriessen-style Euro-Minimalism too; these are pieces which really move. But there’s a satisfying darkness to Davies’s imagination; for all the foot-tapping, this is music with unsettling power and immediacy.

Send in the clowns. Or at least that was Vladimir Jurowski’s musical thinking in bringing together the mighty foursome of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Haydn and Shostakovich and seeing just how far their capricious natures might take us. The allusions and parodies came thick and fast and just when you thought there was no more irony to tap, in came the most outrageous instance of misdirection in the history of 20th-century music: Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony. And that is no joke.

Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past.

Is Shostakovich’s Eleventh a great, grim epic symphony worthy both of its toughest predecessors – 4, 8 and 10 – and of the 1905 massacre it avowedly commemorates, or long-winded film music too subservient to its revolutionary-song material? I used to think the latter, but three conductors have made me change my mind: Rostropovich, taking infinite care over the conjuring of icy Palace Square wastes, Semyon Bychkov winning over the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms and now Vasily Petrenko, pulling off the most profound and surprising coup in what I once found the weakest movement, the finale.

Is Shostakovich’s Eleventh a great, grim epic symphony worthy both of its toughest predecessors – 4, 8 and 10 – and of the 1905 massacre it avowedly commemorates, or long-winded film music too subservient to its revolutionary-song material? I used to think the latter, but three conductors have made me change my mind: Rostropovich, taking infinite care over the conjuring of icy Palace Square wastes, Semyon Bychkov winning over the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms and now Vasily Petrenko, pulling off the most profound and surprising coup in what I once found the weakest movement, the finale.

Eighty years ago yesterday, the 41-year-old Adrian Boult launched the distinguished history of what was then a 114-strong BBC Symphony Orchestra with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture in Portland Place. Three months later ice-and-fire Ernest Ansermet was over to conduct Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in a programme which included the composer at the piano. Both works were indispensible to last night's celebrations: crispbread and butter wrapped around an equally representative contemporary filling that spread its wow factor relatively thin.

This week Scottish Ballet opens its new season with a ballet of genius that began life in the bath. The bath is a great place for inspiration. The Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered the law of hydrostatics in it. The choreographer Frederick Ashton also had one of his major lightbulb moments while having a soak, idly listening to the radio in 1947 when a new piece of music came on.

Two years after its first festive spree of 100 events, Kings Place has become the most congenial of all London's concert-hall zones in which to hang loose. On Friday afternoon I could have trotted happily between Russian piano classics, youth jazz and storytellers. I stayed with pianist Mikhail Rudy and cellist Alexander Ivashkin because I was intrigued to know how Rudy's stamina would hold out from a monument of the Russian repertoire in the first concert to a punishing transcription in the third.