"Contemporary classical", for want of a better term, works best in concert as a cornucopia of shortish new works offering a healthy range of styles and voices. Add to the mix six of the most exhilarating and original chamber concertos ever, by no means casting complementary premieres in the shade, put together some of the UK’s best musicians and make it an afternoon marathon taking place in the round  aatn extraordinary venue, and success should be total.

More than half a century has passed since John Eliot Gardiner’s choir and orchestras first won their historically-informed licence to thrill. A feverish Saturday night at St Martin-in-the-Fields proved that Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists can still quicken the pulse and rinse the ears of the most jaded concert-goer.

Xian Zhang is clearly a versatile conductor. In this concert, with the London Symphony Orchestra, she presented a fascinating strings work by Chinese composer Qigang Chen and a new trombone concerto by Dani Howard, all framed with favourites from Ravel and Stravinsky.

The baton passed, metaphorically, to the Hallé last night in the Vaughan Williams symphony cycle shared between them and the BBC Philharmonic to mark the composer’s 150^th anniversary. Literally, that baton was in the same hand as on the last date, for it was John Wilson who conducted the Ninth Symphony, as he had the second and seventh 12 days ago. This time VW was paired with Holst, as the second part of the concert consisted of The Planets.

I expected the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s Usher Hall concert to be jam-packed with a joyful melee of admiring friends and relatives. This is a vast orchestra of over 100, and it wouldn’t take that many aunts and uncles to fill the Usher’s cavernous spaces, but in the event the audience for this inspiring and diverse programme was disappointingly thin.

Having not heard a Passion live for several years I decided to do two in close succession, to compare pieces from different ends of the musical spectrum.

The last of this season’s Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concert series Voices from the East featured music from Azerbaijan with Kirill Karabits focusing on works by the contemporary composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and her teacher Kara Karayev.

At first sight, Vaughan Williams’ Second and Seventh Symphonies might seem to have a lot in common. Both are quite programmatic and pictorial, the second (the London) including music that might have finished up as a tone poem, and the seventh (Sinfonia antartica) adapted from his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic (1948).

Dublin is feted as the city of the word, peaking on Bloomsday, 16 June, in celebration of Ulysses’ centenary. Yet its concert and opera scene is broadening in brilliance. Had I known before yesterday that the vivacious Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra were performing Bach’s B minor Mass in Christ Church Cathedral, I might not have chosen to hear what until recently was called the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland – and wouldn’t have known what I’d missed.

Three Beethoven quartets, early, middle and late, in a single evening – inevitably as part of a cycle, like the Jerusalems’ Wigmore Hall triptych last night – is demanding on the audience, supremely tough on the players.