The Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place last night showcased both the best and worst things about attending live concerts, with the pros outweighing the cons. Early on, extraneous noise made me long for the pure listening experience of a good pair of headphones, but elsewhere the immediacy and physicality of the live experience was genuinely exciting.

Before the age of photography, people and places were recorded in ink or paint or sound. The process of recording was not instant, could not be rushed, and produced by its nature an experience of layers. On the last leg of a brief UK tour, the Basel Chamber Orchestra brought to Cadogan Hall two landscapes and two portraits, in performances notably true to life and unified as harmoniously as a Rothko quartet by the ensemble’s own cultivated tonal palette.

STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has such a rapport with her Birmingham public that she can silence a capacity crowd - 2000-plus audience members, spilling over into Symphony Hall’s choir stalls – with the tiniest of gestures. Into that silence she neatly placed the first chord of Messiaen’s Un sourire, and you could hear every fibre of the string texture.

Only connect.

Intellectual rigour and emotional honesty are the rewarding qualities in András Schiff’s Bach playing. Virtuosity comes as standard, too. And you get value for your money – his programme all but filled two-and-a-half hours, and he was as completely in command at the end as he had been at the beginning.

More so, if anything. If Schiff is not entirely satisfied with the way something comes out, he’ll play the whole section of the music again, just to show what it really can be like.

Florian Boesch is a big man. He’s tall, stocky, and with his bald head and stubble could seem more like a gangster than a Lieder singer. His voice is beautiful, but it matches his appearance – big, weighty and imposing. He has subtlety too, though it is sometimes hard-won, and his affinity with the core Romantic repertoire is always apparent, so this programme, of Schubert, Wolf and Schumann was well chosen to showcase his strengths.

To demonstrate what makes chamber masterpieces tick and then to play them, brilliantly, is a sequence which ought to happen more often. Perhaps too many musicians think their eloquence is confined to their instruments. Not violinist Simon Blendis and pianist William Howard of the Schubert Ensemble.

Collaboration and collegiality are becoming ever more important across the Scottish arts scene, it seems. Glasgow theatre company Vanishing Point teamed up with Scottish Opera earlier this year for a double-bill based around Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.

Amen. The end – of a prayer, a service, even the Bible itself. But what, asks Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No 3, Kaddish, if “Amen” is the beginning and not the end, the start of a conversation that hears the divine word and doesn’t say “So be it” and accept, but instead answers back?