Janáček has been an abiding passion for Thomas Adès. As both composer and performer, Adès revels in the whimsical and the absurd, and he finds both in Janáček’s piano works.

The London Philharmonic’s year-long Stravinsky festival, Changing Faces, concluded here in spectacular style, with a tribute to “The Swingling Sixties”. Vladimir Jurowski, the soon to be leaving – and soon to be much-missed, Principal Conductor of the LPO, devised an adventurous and innovative programme, pairing Stravinsky’s late masterpiece Threni with the contemporaneous Sinfonia of Berio.

Mitsuko Uchida continues her world tour of Schubert sonatas with two concerts for the home crowd, this the second of her appearances at the Festival Hall. The tour coincides with Uchida’s 70th birthday, but the years have done little to diminish her technique.

With eyes swivelled towards who'll take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen as the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor in 2021, two of the strongest possibilities are to be found within the orchestra's masthead of associates.

Seldom has an encore felt so welcome. With Sir Antonio Pappano as his accompanist at the Barbican, Ian Bostridge tugged us through the mill of industrialised slaughter and the psychic devastation it leaves in an ambitious programme of song sequences that evoked “war, and the pity of war”. Requiem – a sort of launch gig for the recording of this programme that the pair have just released – concluded with four songs from Benjamin Britten’s 1969 cycle Who are these children?: settings of poems by William Soutar.

At first sight, performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – premiered in 1913 and sometimes seen as presaging the whole world of modernism – in the centenary year of the 1918 Armistice might seem to be lagging behind in timing (if centenaries float your boat).

Krzysztof Penderecki is the elder statesman of Polish music, and celebrations for his 85th birthday in Warsaw were suitably grand. Penderecki has been setting the agenda for contemporary music, in Poland and beyond, since the 1950s.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's latest dynamo of a music director and communication incarnate, doesn't believe in taking it easy.

Not really a song recital, nor a chamber music programme, this musical grab bag definitely was definitely popular. The programme of predominantly recent music was sold out weeks ahead. The notably younger-than-usual audience received it enthusiastically, and rightly so.

It’s Christmas already at Wigmore Hall. Or advent at least – this concert of Bach Advent cantatas was presented by the English Concert without apology or qualification, despite it still being the middle of November. But it proved a welcome fillip for a wet and dreary November evening, with the energetic and engaged playing of the small ensemble bringing out all the life and playfulness in Bach’s scores.