Conducting the staple Viennese fare of New Year's Day is no easy task. Quite apart from the basic essential panache - so drearily missing from Austrian Franz Welser-Möst's 2023 shot in Vienna itself, abundantly present this year from live wire Yannick Nézet-Séguin - there has to be the right space for the upbeat to the waltz, freedom in the melodies, energy but not mania in the fast polkas. 

Concert one-offs can be experiences to last a lifetime (immediately springing to mind is Jakub Hrůša’s BBC Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich 11). But this has been a year above all for the best of festival planning, the sort where you feel enriched by connecting threads.

If this time of year should prompt everyone to count their blessings, then one precious musical gift shines brightly over Smith Square Hall this week.

Vox Luminis, the vocal and instrumental group based in Namur and led by Lionel Meunier, continued their residency at the Wigmore Hall, hot on the heels of a memorable rendition of Bach’s B Mass at the Spanish Church a few blocks away, with an equally breathtaking evening of works by Bach and his predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, Johann Kuhnau.

When, in late 2021, I heard the UK premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, it truly felt like a heaven-sent gift of musical and vocal splendour after the long famine of our lockdown purgatory. Four years later, with the renewed thrill of large-scale live performance no longer so acute, how does it hold up?

There were moments during the starry, two-evening Beare’s Chamber Music Festival when the quality of the playing reached such heights, it was tempting to ask if a higher level of chamber music-making can or even could exist anywhere. So, although London already has an incredibly rich and vibrant chamber music scene, this event – in its second edition and planned to take place every two years -  is clearly additive to it. The two concerts were vociferously applauded, especially  the second, Wigmore Hall concert, in which there were standing ovations at the end of each half.

“My goal was to take the Messiah as if it had been written yesterday,” the conductor and eminent French harpsichordist Christophe Rousset told Tom Service on Radio 3 on Saturday. “[It would be] as if we had received the score for the first time… [and were thinking] wow, how amazing this piece is and how fresh it can be.”

There is, of course, a long tradition in this country of Christmas Messiah performances – but it’s not one I’ve ever previously participated in. This was the first time I’ve ever heard Messiah live, despite being quite long in the tooth – and it was terrific. I can see what I’ve been missing out on all these years.

It seldom happens that you long to hear choral music not in a modern auditorium but some chilly, echoing cavern of a great Victorian town hall.

There are enough historical reasons for differing approaches to Handel’s Messiah to allow every conductor to produce, effectively, their own edition.