To watch Martin Hayes play the Irish fiddle is like watching a man possessed by his music. As his bow flickers across the strings the infectious energy of it spills into the air, through his limbs, and eventually out into the whistling, whooping crowd. 

If there was love in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Valentine’s concert, then it was very much of the doomed variety. There was Romeo and Juliet, of course, as imagined in Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture, and Zemlinsky’s marvellously strange take on The Little Mermaid. 

Pretty much any performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is a special occasion, but this one perhaps more so than most. For one thing, it was a landmark event in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 90th anniversary year - the only concert this season that saw the return of Sir Donald Runnicles, their Conductor Emeritus. 

Almost everything about Piotr Anderszewski's Wigmore Hall recital pleased, intrigued and even thrilled – except, perhaps, the order of the works. The Polish-born pianist opened with his selection of a dozen of Brahms’s late solo pieces, from the Op. 116 to 119 sets, and returned after the interval with the thunderous heavy cavalry of Beethoven’s final sonata, Op. 111. Compare, and contrast, the supreme leave-takings of both poets of the piano.

The BBC NOW called this concert Echoes of France, which was both an understatement and a partial misnomer. Cardiff’s St David’s Hall being currently out of action, the orchestra is playing its regular concerts in the much smaller Hoddinott Hall, but with no concession to the acoustical trivia of decibels, balance and blend. Misnomer?

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.