Even for a singer as driven, communicative and self-reliant as Joyce DiDonato, the song recital with string quartet is a bold step. Whereas an endless repertoire of songs with piano exists, there is virtually nothing off-the-peg for singer and string quartet; it is a case of commissioning the arrangements, and to some extent building your own art form.

Just when you can scarcely move for Messiahs, two Christmas Oratorios came along at once on Saturday night. That’s London concert schedules for you. While John Butt and his Dunedin Consort unwrapped four of the cantatas at the Wigmore Hall, Vladimir Jurowski presented all six. Was it too much of a good thing?

This time of year lots of choirs give lots of Christmas concerts that are more or less the same: traditional repertoire perhaps sprinkled with a few novelties. But Tenebrae’s concert on Saturday at Kings Place broke the mould with some imaginative programming, giving us just enough Christmas but no more, and some quite stunning choral singing.

Leonard Bernstein is 100 already. Actually, he’s not – his centenary falls in 2018, but the LSO, an orchestra he conducted many times, is building up to the anniversary with a series of concerts featuring his three symphonies.

To compose a masterpiece in your teens is rare enough; to choose the most elaborate form in chamber music, an octet for eight strings, ensures a peculiar kind of immortality. George Enescu, a still-underestimated genius described by protege Yehudi Menuhin as "the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician...I have ever experienced", thought in complicated and unique ways at 19, leaving to posterity a difficult and elusive work.

An icy, wet wind snuck under the door of house number 8 in Fournier Street, where Uri Caine, bundled in coat and woolly hat, conjured Schumann’s darkly powerful "Im Rhein". Beside him, perched on a weaver’s stool, was improvising legend Phil Minton, rasping, whistling and groaning his way through "The wilderness of my life".

Expectations ran high for Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida in Winterreise.

The Chineke! Orchestra has won golden opinions for its ground-breaking work and musical achievement, and Manchester caught up to the extent of a visit from the eight-person Chineke! Ensemble to the Royal Northern College of Music.

After Sakari Oramo's dazzling Sibelius rattlebag with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the centenary day of Finnish independence, things weren't looking so good for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at half time last Thursday (★★★). Then along came the Four Lemminkäinen Legends, an early Sibelius masterpiece teeming with invention and strangeness, long a Salonen speciality.

Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is a big work in every sense: four movements, plus a solo cadenza before the last one that makes it seem almost like five; a soloist’s role that even David Oistrakh (for whom it was first written) found taxing; symphonic construction and instrumentation which make the orchestral contribution at least as important as the solo one.