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.

Our most adventurous guitarist never does anything twice, at least not in quite the same form. Days after a recital in Dublin's Royal Irish Academy of Music, he included several items from that programme in a unique three-parter.

Anna Lapwood may not be the only virtuoso organist to celebrate the centenary of Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie concertante this year, but with her performance with the Hallé under Katharina Wincor she was almost certainly the first. It’s one of the most taxing – if only for the sheer stamina required of its soloist – and multi-faceted works for organ and orchestra ever written.

To the great Weill interpreters she summoned at the start of her First person for theartsdesk, from Cathy Berberian to Tom Waits, can now be added mezzo-soprano Katie Bray's contribution. The hour's worth of songs from the German, French and American eras she presented in the perfect Fidelio Cafe setting, the wintry night outside and cosiness within evoking Berlin or Vienna haunts, didn't include everything that's on her new CD, but it all made perfect sense, and saved the most emotional until last.

Composer Zoë Martlew’s album (Album Z) launch in the surround-sound environment of Hall 2 at Kings Place thrived on a theatricality rare outside the world of rock music and clubs. A wondrously energetic person, overflowing with a generosity and capacity for heartfelt relationship, Martlew thrives on high drama, as a performer as well as a person, with an almost child-like joy in making music that’s irresistibly contagious.

Never mind the singing, Roderick Williams could have been a great TV presenter or even stand-up, on the evidence of his spoken introduction at the Wigmore Hall last night. It was the best pre-concert speech I’ve heard for a long time – relaxed, witty, authoritative and engaging – and this is not damning with faint praise, as the recital that followed was completely delightful.

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.