French-Danish soprano Elsa Dreisig’s operatic schedule is so busy and so successful, it is perhaps not surprising that she – and Texas-born pianist Jonathan Ware – treat the song recital platform as a place of freedom, where, rather than delivering the predictable or the comforting, they can test out ideas and set themselves challenges. As she has told one interviewer, it is a place where "I can push my artistic practice to its ultimate limit."

What a manifesto against those in power who seem determined to knock the UK off its hard-won classical music pedestal: hundreds of young choristers and instrumentalists of two fabulous orchestras in a week-long celebration of innovative programming and presentation. Any politician attending – I’d like to think there were a few, but I doubt it - would have been fired up to devote every effort in support of British youth and music

In today’s Britain, too many concert reviews have to begin with the vandalistic threats of damage or extinction that hang over their performers. Last week, it emerged that the BBC’s bosses may be open to negotiate an alternative future for its Symphony Orchestra that does not involve 20 per cuts in the personnel.

One can only admire the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for its steadfast indifference to the laws of box office gravity. A little known contemporary guitar concerto allied to a relatively unpopular Mahler symphony would be a hard sell even in an Edinburgh Festival context. On a distinctly chilly April evening in Edinburgh, it fell to a small but vocal audience of camp followers to make up for the disappointing rows of empty seats in the admittedly cavernous Usher Hall. 

In the kerfuffle over the proposed decimation of English National Opera, the BBC Singers and the BBC orchestras, the removal of all Arts Council England’s funding for the Britten Sinfonia has slipped a bit under the radar, but is no less egregious.

In search of relatively rare fabulous beasts like César Franck’s Piano Quintet – given a fantastical performance last night – you often have to take in the ubiquitous Shostakovich specimen, the modest work of a master using simple means to his own creative ends that doesn’t bear too much repeated listening over a short space of time.

London concert life is infinitely varied, especially if you dig below the surface. So after spending Tuesday evening in the lofty Royal Albert Hall, on Wednesday I was 16 metres below ground, in the tunnel shaft of the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe for a multi-media event celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, 62 years ago to the day.

The recently re-branded National Youth Choir was founded in 1983 as a single choir of about 100 voices, and in those 40 years has grown to be a family of four, ranging from the nine-year-olds at the bottom of the boys’ and girls’ choirs to the 25-year-olds at the top of the NYC proper.

The turbulence and agitation of betrayal could be felt from the word go in this galvanising performance of the St John Passion, which administered a jolting urgency to Bach’s radical portrayal of the Easter story. The work will be 300 years old next year, yet this Polyphony Good Friday performance – a fixture at St John’s Smith Square for slightly fewer years – delivered a version as fresh and discomfiting as if the crucifixion had taken place yesterday.

Tenebrae in tenebris: put more plainly, a top choir that’s anything but shadowy, except when it needs to be, doing its bit for the darkness of Maundy Thursday. The thoughtful plaiting of Bach motets with three Tenebrae Responsories and other works by our top choral composer, James MacMillan, worked well until the last work on the programme. Then they had to go and spoil it all by premature ejaculation.