Getting on for 27 years ago, Thomas Adès’ These Premises Are Alarmed was one of the pieces commissioned by the Hallé for a premiere in the opening series of concerts at the new Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Kent Nagano.

Paul Lewis secured his reputation as a leading advocate of the Viennese Classical repertoire with two releases of late Schubert sonatas on Harmonia Mundi. That was 20 years ago, but he returned to Schubert in 2022, with a release of earlier sonatas, music that requires more interpretive personality, something that Lewis can always provide.

For its 22nd concert the hugely successful initiative, Through The Noise, took its audience to The Jago in Dalston, the live music venue formerly known as Passing Clouds. Here, on a stage more familiar with reggae, blues and Afrobeat, 25-year-old classical trumpeter Aaron Akugbo joined forces with harpist Milo Harper (pictured below) for a series of sultry, haunting numbers that explored the possibilities of this unusual pairing.

Rigorous, hauntingly original and unlike each other, Britten’s three numbered quartets could share a programme and still stake equal claims on our attention. That might be tough on the players, but the Castalians haven’t been easy on themselves in the three concerts they’ve given to share out the honours between Britten and other composers.

“Let the organ thunder!” is the sentiment a lot of us will associate with an orchestral concert featuring the king of instruments. The Hallé’s programme with Anna Lapwood as soloist (repeating, from her BBC Proms debut with them in 2021, the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony) seemed designed to evoke that thought.

But the organ in the Bridgewater Hall isn’t exactly made for thundering. Big Bertha it is not. What it is really good at is a light, clear and sometimes fiery sound – ideal for Poulenc’s 1939 Organ Concerto, which was the undoubted highlight of the evening.

Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet will play at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in June: the next stage of an acclaimed progress that began at Glyndebourne in 2017. Now on the last stretch of his three-year stint as composer-in-residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the prolific and versatile Australian – formerly a violist with the Berlin Phil – evidently still has warring royal families on his mind.

When a publication as venerable as Gramophone features an artist on its front cover, it’s a surefire sign that they’ve hit the big time. This month that honour fell to young American violinist Randall Goosby and, coincidentally, he was the soloist for this week’s concerts with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. I hadn’t come across him before this double encounter but, if his Usher Hall performance is anything to go by, then the hype around him is justified.

Complex, ambiguous late romantic works in concert programmes need something more direct to keep them company. Mozart and Richard Strauss make excellent bedfellows (and Strauss was an extraordinary Mozart interpreter): no wonder Vladimir Jurowski’s Saturday night pairing worked well. But Mahler and Poulenc? That wasn’t Simon Rattle’s original intention; but in campaigning for the BBC Singers by inviting them to follow his LSO Mahler 7, he hit upon a rare ideal.

Maybe he thought it was a relaxing way to celebrate his recent 75^th birthday – maybe he just fancied a trip to Manchester to play with the BBC Philharmonic – either way there was something very special to hear in Garrick Ohlsson’s Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto on Saturday.

We hear a lot about political and economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s, winters of discontent and all the rest of it, the predictable if not predicted remote outcome of what Jacques Maritain called the “immense intellectual disarray inherited from the 19th century.”