Goossens: Orchestral works vol.2 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)

At first it all felt too much. In addition to the garish red arum lilies either side of the platform, an overwhelming scent of eau de Cologne from a neighbour and the always hard-to-fight Wigmore Hall torpor were our diva's pink and purple attire, her flashing jewels, and above all that opulent voice, which even in recitals is more accustomed to bigger spaces and still seemed at times to be channelling her demented Salome from The Rest is Noise festival's opening night.

Bach for breakfast, lunch and supper. That in essence was what yesterday's Bach Marathon was about. You can do that with Bach - have him flowing from the taps. Nothing new in this for those of us who experienced the Bach Christmas a few years back on Radio Three, when every note was piped over the airwaves for breakfast, lunch and supper for 10 days solid. Nothing very marathon-like about any of it, though, either. The day’s performances couldn’t have been further from a challenge to sit through or listen to. 

A Leipzig church is surely the place we’d most like to be for Bach on Good Friday. Never mind: the Barbican Hall is kinder to the best period instrument ensembles than it is to big symphony orchestras. Better still, having sat stunned and weepy for a good few minutes at the end of this performance, I’m happy to evangelise and proclaim that no better team could be assembled anywhere for the original 1724 version of this world-changing musical Passion.

Britten: Billy Budd John Mark Ainsley, Jacques Imbraillo, Matthew Rose, Philip Ens, Glyndebourne Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Glyndebourne)

Any conductor who ends a concert with only one leg on the ground, as if engaged in the Highland fling, is either a little fanciful or has been utterly carried away. In Keith Lockhart’s case last night, it was probably a bit of both. No-one can take charge of Duke Ellington’s big band tone poem Harlem by impersonating a lamp-post, especially at its roaring end, the epitome of jubilation in sound. But the BBC Concert Orchestra’s transatlantic Principal Conductor is also a conscious showman. Sometimes his hands trace such sensuous curves that you feel he’s stroking a Ming vase.

Zipangu. What a name for a piece of music. Such a strange and suggestive collection of vowels and consonants. Such a musical string of sounds. A fascinating name. The name, in fact, the programme told me, for Japan during the time of Marco Polo. The life of the composer of the work, Claude Vivier, is fascinating, too, in a grisly way. While completing an opera about a young man who stabs a stranger to death, Vivier was murdered in his Paris flat by a rent boy. Incredible story, incredible-sounding work; you can see why programmers are increasingly attracted to Vivier.

“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s -  and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).

For finding new popes as much as for hunting down new music, looking to the ends of the earth seems a fruitful route to take. Last night saw the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican residency with their principal conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. And with them, they brought the latest music from the Pacific rim, all of it quite surprising.

What Manchester has today, Vienna will have tomorrow. The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor HK “Nali” Gruber is taking his musicians and singers back home to the Wiener Konzerthaus to reprise this concert next week. You can’t fault it for variety – Stravinsky, Britten and MacMillan, Gruber’s predecessor as composer/conductor here. But the main thrust is celebrating Stravinsky. It is the centenary of The Rite of Spring. In the BBC Phil’s series of celebratory concerts, we here came to his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, also premiered in Paris, in 1927.