It's nine years since soprano Lise Davidsen gave a Wigmore Hall audience her first credentials as a recitalist, in true partnership with a pianist to whom she's remained faithful since, James Baillieu. Alexandra Coghlan welcomed her then, and while I'd been bowled over by her role in Pappano's Royal Opera Verdi Requiem and was stunned by her Sibelius Luonnotar, I had some questions about the first half of her Barbican recital.

Yesterday I travelled through a sweltering London in shorts and sandals to go and hear Schubert’s Winterreise, about a bleak journey through a frozen landscape. It was quite the disjuncture, and a strange piece of seasonal programming. But I was glad to hear veteran baritone Thomas Hampson in fine voice in the Schubert, accompanied by Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova, even if the second half of Kurt Weill and Astor Piazzolla was less fulfilling.

Kahchun Wong ended his second season as the Hallé’s principal conductor with a blockbuster – and one from what may be seen as his personal zone of expertise: Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

Blockbuster in the sense that it’s a huge undertaking logistically, with a very large orchestra required, and that it’s a very big work. Blockbuster also almost literally – the finale requires an enormous Thor-like hammer to be wielded, at least twice, to create a thud akin to that of an axe at the base of a tree.

So polished and passionate are the 11 world-class players of Ensemble 360, pioneering music in the round in Sheffield and elsewhere for the past 21 years, that you'd be grateful enough to hear them in wall-to-wall standard fare. But the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival has been about so much more, featuring special curator-performers - pianist Kathryn Stott and cellist Steven Isserlis in previous festivals I was fortunate to attend, this year soprano Claire Booth - and working with top-class folk from other disciplines.

In 1595 a new Doge was invested in St Mark’s in Venice, an occasion celebrated with the full musical panoply at the state’s command. Which was a lot, the Venetians not doings things by halves. In 1990 the Gabrieli Consort and McCreesh made their name – and a fine album – by speculatively recreating the music of this occasion, in all its church-ceremony-meets-political-showcase splendour.

The Philharmonic’s chief conductor John Storgårds was enjoying the taste of his pure, northern native air in Saturday’s concert: Sibelius at the heart of it, with the Violin Concerto played by a brilliant fellow-Finn, plus Rautavaara and Nielsen.

Vivacious Carolin Widmann clearly adores her fellow players in the Irish Chamber Orchestra, where her brother Jörg served as Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Partner until 2021.

The last time I heard the excellent Carice Singers was last year as they marked the 90th birthday of Arvo Pärt. But Pärt’s meditative and inward musical language could not be further from the jagged and confrontational world of Steve Martland, the focus of last Thursday’s Kings Place recital.

With Cardiff’s St David’s Hall continuing under wraps while it gets a new roof, the BBC NOW is still having to be tyre-levered into the much smaller Hoddinott Hall for its public concerts. It refuses to be restricted by this minor inconvenience. Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung, in Thursday’s concert conducted by Alexandre Bloch (pictured above), was done with the usual army of strings and duly pinned us all metaphorically to the back wall with the sheer blast of sound in one of its composer’s noisiest tone poems.

Concertos where the soloist is a member of the orchestra are something of a Scottish Chamber Orchestra speciality. They’re always among their best-sold concerts each season, and there are obvious gains of warmth and communication when the band are playing to support one of their own. This week, the honour fell to Philip Higham, the SCO’s principal cello, and he played Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto with so much involvement and quasi-operatic intensity that it was easy to forget how low down the priority list Schumann’s concertos were until very recently.