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.

It was one of those moments that every conductor (and orchestra) dreads: “The Procession of the Sage” from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is in rip-roaring full cry, percussion grinding and scratching, high trumpet screeching – but Daniele Gatti, it would seem, loses a bar somewhere and gives his Orchestre National de France a premature cut-off, leaving the entire brass section between a rock and a hard place. Stop or play on? An ignominious collapse ensues – as big a blunder as I’ve heard in any professional concert in years. Who says The Rite of Spring no longer has the capacity to shock?

Thirty-five years on and this is still as much David Hockney’s Rake as it is Stravinsky’s or W H Auden’s. How rarely it is that what we see chimes so completely and utterly with what we hear. The limited palette of colours, the precisely etched cross-hatching, the directness and the cunningly conceived elements of parody – am I talking about Hockney or Stravinsky? Two great individualists in complete harmony. So why the disconnection?

She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant Belle Epoque drawing room. Music swirls, eyes swivel. And no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known to all and sundry as Coco, is making an entrance. Another one.

"There is not one idea," wrote that intemperate critic Eduard Hanslick about Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, "that does not get its neck broken by the speed with which the next lands on its head." Rather a compliment, I've always thought, and certainly so as applied to James MacMillan's new Violin Concerto. As soloist Vadim Repin and conductor Valery Gergiev whirled us tumultuously through its hyperactive songs and dances, there was so much I wanted to savour, to hear again. That won't be a problem.

As in his first concert this season with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Adams the composer-conductor moved last night from the natural phenomena of an older master to his own illuminated chronicle of man-made unease. City Noir, his latest orchestral symphony in all but name, bears his trademark knit of rhythms both bludgeoning and capricious with sinuous melodic nocturnes: the mixture rather as before, but with a fresh twist of LA jazz. You'd think the marriage of harmony and invention would free up his conducting of other men's music. Oddly, though, that remained doggedly beat-bound, to be saved at the last minute by Jeremy Denk's astounding sense of fantasy in Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind.As in his first concert this season with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Adams the composer-conductor moved last night from the natural phenomena of an older master to his own illuminated chronicle of man-made unease. City Noir, his latest orchestral symphony in all but name, bears his trademark knit of rhythms both bludgeoning and capricious with sinuous melodic nocturnes: the mixture rather as before, but with a fresh twist of LA jazz. You'd think the marriage of harmony and invention would free up his conducting of other men's music. Oddly, though, that remained doggedly beat-bound, to be saved at the last minute by Jeremy Denk's astounding sense of fantasy in Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind.