The stage of the Royal Albert Hall has a rather unfortunate habit of making orchestras seem incidental. Stretching endlessly across, one of the world’s largest organs by way of backdrop, even the most generous conventional ensembles take on Lilliputian proportions. Youth orchestras, with their Romantic scale and do-or-die attack, often emerge best from this encounter, as the Simón Bolívar and Gustav Mahler ensembles have recently proved. Framed by eight double basses and five horns, the Royal Albert Hall finally starts to make sense as a performance space. In the hands (and lips) of the Australian Youth Orchestra last night, it not only made sense, it made music.

Ninette de Valois said the solution to a shortage of choreographic talent was this: “You wait.” Waiting through the Nineties and early Noughties proved the Royal Ballet founder’s point - suddenly new distinctive ballet talent is cropping up all over the place. Taking the pressure off Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor, young Liam Scarlett showed his confident colours this spring, and now, segueing on from his distinctive performing career at Covent Garden, here is Viacheslav Samodurov, the undoubted star of the Royal Ballet’s New Works programme in the Linbury Studio last night.

Another night, another cast, another Judas Tree (see first-night review below this) - and yet more proof of what a tough, durable, shape-shifting piece Kenneth MacMillan created in his last year of life. Recently theartsdesk interviewee Thiago Soares talked of his preparations to play the central male in this gladiatorial ballet, and last night he made the role of the Foreman his own, taking to the stage like a razor-edged switchblade as the head of the gang of labourers who prowl at night through Canary Wharf and carry girls’ bodies to and fro.

Mastery was always going to be the overriding virtue of Mariss Jansons's latest appearance; his many visits to London with one or other of his continental superbands guarantee nothing less. But would it, to paraphrase Callas's immortal masterclass question, favour expression or fireworks? The options remain open, for Jansons at least, even in as severe a work as Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, unquestioned masterpiece but also a tour staple. Jansons steered his cultured, mobile Bavarian players neatly, not dispassionately but a little weightlessly through every gear change of the titanic first movement. It was a Sarah Waters novel, an elegantly negotiated page-turner, rather than a Hilary Mantel epic written in blood. Then, with the liberating horn cry of the pivotal third movement, expression conquered all and never let go.Mastery was always going to be the overriding virtue of Mariss Jansons's latest appearance; his many visits to London with one or other of his continental superbands guarantee nothing less. But would it, to paraphrase Callas's immortal masterclass question, favour expression or fireworks? The options remain open, for Jansons at least, even in as severe a work as Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, unquestioned masterpiece but also a tour staple. Jansons steered his cultured, mobile Bavarian players neatly, not dispassionately but a little weightlessly through every gear change of the titanic first movement. It was a Sarah Waters novel, an elegantly negotiated page-turner, rather than a Hilary Mantel epic written in blood. Then, with the liberating horn cry of the pivotal third movement, expression conquered all and never let go.

This is the fifth time on theartsdesk that a review has been headed as above - so you must be thinking it had better be justified or bribery will be suspected. But it's not just the phosphorescent fascination that flickers around the charismatic young LPO principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski that draws the crowds, it is his inquiring programming. Last night it was another of those games that one couldn’t resist, if a game, in the end, of two halves.

I whizzed back to my previous reviews of BlackSkyWhite when I got home last night to check how much I’d enjoyed them in the past, so disappointing was their offering for the London International Mime Festival, USSR Was Here. Russians have colonised mime theatre with a razor-edged passion and ingenuity in theatrecraft that usually makes any Russian company a must-see in the Mimefest.

Laid-back Tenerife and Gran Canaria won't know what's hit them when the London Philharmonic Orchestra and its principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski land next week. The islands can expect to be sense-bombed by the jungly exuberance of Szymanowski and devastated by the scorched-earth tactics of Shostakovich at his most extreme. Even Londoners used to the highly sophisticated assaults of the city's most challenging orchestral partnership, and faced with the same programme last night, may have been taken aback by the keenly directed electricity of the occasion.

They're still bringing Beethoven and Shostakovich to London, enriching the mix a little with the cross-referencing of Alfred Schnittke, but the personnel of the Borodin Quartet have changed again. Patriarch cellist Valentin Berlinsky, there at the start over 60 years ago, passed on his bow to Vladimir Balshin before he died.  Balshin is a worthy successor, especially since Berlinsky's tone had become translucent to the point of dematerialising and his successor's is rich indeed, but is "Borodin Quartet" now more a brand name than a vital entity?