On a dank January evening in St Albans, there seemed little sign of life or excitement on the streets. To reach my destination – St Peter’s Church – I first had to walk through an ancient graveyard where the yew trees loomed like sentinels. It was quite a contrast to enter the church itself, where the sudden blaze of light and warmth and packed aisles made it clear that this, for tonight at least, was the heartbeat of St Alban’s.

There is nothing to compare with the visceral experience of hearing a massed choir – in this case the 230-strong combined forces of the Crouch End Festival Chorus and the Hertfordshire Chorus – in full-throated fortissimo. Add in a team of stellar soloists and an inspirational conductor and the result was a very enjoyable musical evening at the Royal Festival Hall.

The cellist and the pianist famously have a more competitive relationship in Brahms’ Cello Sonata in E minor than in many compositions for solo instrument and piano. Brahms composed it for the Viennese singing teacher and cellist Dr Joseph Gänsbacher – when, on first playthrough, Gänsbacher complained he couldn’t hear himself because of the piano part, Brahms bellowed back, “You’re lucky.”

Any conductor undertaking a journey through Mahler's symphonies - and Vladimir Jurowski's with the London Philharmonic Orchestra has been among the deepest - needs to give us the composer's last thoughts, not just the first movement (which, along with the short "Purgatorio" at the centre of the symphony, was all that Mahler fully scored). Or so I thought every time I heard Deryck Cooke's restrained but not anaemic performing version.

Perhaps it was the thought of “Blue Monday”, which fell a week ago, that stimulated the choice of Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste as the opening piece of this concert. Certainly there can be few short pieces of music filled with such unremitting misery from start to finish.

It was a pleasure to see conductor Duncan Ward back in Manchester. His Hallé debut was by no means his first time in the city – he trained at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music and has conducted the BBC Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata in the past, and some may even remember him as a student with an orchestra he took to the Arndale shopping centre, making music in the malls, back in 2011.

Every visit by Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's former Principal Conductor and now Conductor Emeritus, is unmissable, and this fascinating programme outdid expectations.

After the myriad intricacies and moodswings of Janáček's The Makropulos Case on Tuesday and Thursday - I was lucky to catch both performances, the second even more electrifying than the first - the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle seemed to be enjoying a relative holiday last night.

Marketed as “City Noir” to begin with, this programme title was switched to “Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4” closer to the off, perhaps because the more familiar of the two main items in it would ring more bells with potential attenders. Unsurprisingly, it proved a thing of two halves, with Beethoven in the first, and John Adams’ self-described symphony inspired by Los Angeles, from 2009, in the second.

Director Bill Barclay’s new collaboration with the Gesualdo Six – commissioned by St Martin-In-The Fields for its 300^th anniversary – brings an opulent intensity to its depiction of a man whose troubled existence was reflected in darkly ravishing music. Gesualdo’s life was in many ways the counterpoint to Christ’s – born into privilege, he allowed himself to be defined by lust and a murderous thirst for revenge. So it’s one of his many disturbing paradoxes that he identified so strongly with Jesus’s suffering.