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.

The Hallé Orchestra is still in many ways the well honed, burnished instrument created by Sir Mark Elder over his near quarter-century as its music director, and his calm authority over it was apparent in almost every note of this, his second Bridgewater Hall appearance in the present season.

Serendipity smiled on a lunchtime event you'd have been happy to hear any time, anywhere in the world. Edward Gardner's typically engaging short introduction told us that Royal Academy of Music string students were facing exams in a fortnight, so the brief was to find a programme predominantly for wind and brass.

In the delirious and exhilarating Sephardic dance that finished their concert devoted to the Jewish, Muslim and Christian music of Jerusalem, one of the Apollo’s Fire fiddlers seemed to be playing – so my companion spotted – some Led Zeppelin riffs.