Famously Handel and Bach never met, despite being born in the same year in the same country. So it was fun to see the programme for the English Concert’s delightful, vivacious performance in St George's Hanover Square playfully pit the two composers against each other by presenting works that they both composed in their thirties.

Last week I saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play which behind its pyrotechnic wit affirms that sorrow and calamity can strike chaotically at the heart of any human idyll. At first glance, the programme presented at Kings Place by the ever-resourceful Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, with Vermont-born folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and a quartet from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, looked rich in time-honoured pastoral pleasures. 

Valentine’s Day was only a week gone when the BBC Philharmonic gave us a programme on the theme of love. And the most haunting memory of it all was the gentle, song-inspired and highly original Viola Concerto by Cassandra Miller. It’s subtitled "I cannot love without trembling" and was played by this orchestra at the Proms under John Storgårds on 31 July 2024, by all accounts leaving everyone mesmerized.

The legendary Jamaican-born bass Willard White made his New York City Opera breakthrough the year I was born, so he has been around a long time (I am no spring chicken). But any fear that time had diminished his powers was gone within seconds of him starting to sing in his recital last night at Kings Place. Willard White has still got it.

Saul has lately been occupied by opera. Lauded versions, above all Barrie Kosky’s recently-revived smash for Glyndebourne, have claimed Handel’s mighty oratorio from 1739 as a virtual theatre piece with the stage directions mislaid. Yet its incandescent drama of rage, envy, betrayal, love and derangement lives in the blazing, epic music – trombones, carillion, harp and all – that partners every step of the Israelite king’s descent into destruction.

I still retain a vivid memory of a concert in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2013 at which Hungarian composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta sat at an upright piano with their backs to the audience and played excerpts from his Játékok collection of progressive teaching pieces, interspersed with arrangements of Bach chorale preludes for piano duet (Pictured below). The audience might have been eavesdropping on an afternoon of private music-making.

Kahchun Wong is continuing to put his own stamp on landmark works of the mainstream repertory with the Hallé. This time it was Beethoven’s Third, "Eroica", Symphony. 

Bayard Rustin is a fascinating but little-known figure in US history: a civil rights organiser who worked behind the scenes on both the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, as well as campaigning for pacifism (he was on the British anti-nuclear Aldermaston March in 1958) and gay rights. He was also an accomplished singer and lutenist, and advocate for Elizabethan song repertoire.

Perfectly at one in matching tone and response, this phenomenal duo who are both formidable solo personalities in their own right also took us through a range of colours and approaches in a cornucopia of masterpieces for both four hands at one piano and two instruments placed side by side, from Bach to Lutoslawski, Debussy to Tailleferre.

Two concerts packed with thorny repertoire playing to large and enthusiastic audiences of all ages: the London Philharmonic Orchestra is cresting a tricky wave right now. A fortnight ago Conductor Emeritus Vladimir Jurowski held us spellbound with mechanistic Mosolov and Prokofiev (the insanely difficult Second Symphony); last night Principal Conductor Edward Gardner served up Czech and Polish rarities, drawing equal fire from the players. Proof indeed that the successor was the right choice.