Music, Wagner famously pronounced, is the art of transition. For the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, by contrast, music is “the art of punctuation”. On the one hand, how to get from one thing to the next; on the other hand, how to separate one thing from the next. But in the end the problem is much the same: how do we make sense of large chunks of time that contain nothing but music?

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

Elgar and Delius are two geniuses who only ever composed themselves - the first drawing heavily on psychology and physiognomy, the second drenching his country visions in painful nostalgia. So it made good sense to have man and nature side by side in Sir Andrew Davis's latest enterprising concert. Oh, and there was a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society's Elgar Bursary too, though this was only "new" music by the old guard. I suspect that the BBC Symphony players could have done without Edwin Roxburgh's Concerto for Orchestra in a heavy programme, resplendently though they tackled it, and so could I.

I would call them burglars: musicians from the experimental rock, electronica and sound-art traditions who cross the genre divide, sneak into the world of classical music, pillage its more easily pillaged valuables, thieve its respectability, filch its original ideas, and sprint back breathlessly to their wide-eyed fans to show off this brilliantly clever "new" classical music (much of which is made up of techniques that George Benjamin would have grown out of by the age of six) in double quick time lest someone from classical music pins them down for long enough to inform them how rubbish

"Well, Kissin's the star of the show,"  opined the fatuous gentleman who rolled in late to my row after the first piece on the programme. Possibly not, I wanted to snap back, in the light of that very fine pianist's current erratic form. But in any case this celebrity-hunter had just missed one of the great conductors working effortless miracles of charm on Josef Suk's Scherzo fantastique, the extended lollipop lilt of which could quickly pall in lesser hands.

Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is a glorious collusion of intellect and fantasy. Her recitals are meticulously planned but seemingly unexpected with chosen pieces impacting upon each other in ways one might not have imagined. Three keyboard giants – Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin – were the meat of this recital with not an incidental or superfluous note to be found anywhere.

The first phrase of the first piece by Georges Enescu - silken, expressive, rounded, breathed to perfection - established a very good case for Håkan Hardenberger being the greatest living trumpeter. The rest of his Wigmore Hall recital established a pretty equally watertight case against.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.

As experienced Wagnerian Jiří Bělohlávek came on to launch the BBCSO's new season in mid-air with the Tristan Prelude, I wondered whether the world's finest interpreter of Isolde's serving maid Brangäne, lustrous mezzo Sarah Connolly, was waiting to up her game, and her range, and tackle the Liebestod. Sadly not: that remained, as often in concert, Music Minus One. Connolly was there for a different kind of game-upping - a noble attempt to enter the charmed circle that's developed around the memory of the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with husband Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs.

This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.