Two things to note in Thursday’s Hallé performance at the Bridgewater Hall: the debut in the Manchester main series of their highly talented new assistant conductor, Jonathon Heyward, and another stride along the road towards the Hallé/Elder complete edition of the Vaughan Williams symphonies. Oh, and there was a very fine piece of virtuoso violin playing from James Ehnes, whose performance of Bruch's Second Violin Concerto would probably have been the headliner in any other circumstances … and the revelation of an unusual piece by Janáček.

Mahler said of the last movement of his Fourth Symphony that it should be pure, like the “undifferentiated blue of the sky”. Writing the symphony in his lakeside retreat at Maiernigg in the summer of 1900, he probably had a different sort of blue in mind to that which streaked the Edinburgh sky on an icy Sunday afternoon in November. For Donald Runnicles, returning to conduct the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, there was clearly something of the onset of winter in what is normally the sunniest of Mahler symphonies.

I could have sworn there was a spontaneous outbreak of phased coughing in the Barbican Hall on Saturday night, rapidly dissolving into laughter; such was the festive atmosphere at Steve Reich’s 80th birthday gig. This three-part epic attracted a full house, spanning the generations – from Michael Nyman, behind me mischievously proclaiming Reich’s debt to him, to students catching a glimpse of a legend.

The Borodin Quartet has been playing for over 70 years, and in the early days collaborated closely with Dmitri Shostakovich. None of the players from then are in the line-up now, of course, but the group has worked hard to maintain its distinctive identity and performance traditions, even as the players change. And they have a good claim to continuity: Valentin Berlinsky, the legendary cellist who was with the quartet almost from the start, was still playing with them up until 2007.

Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No.1, Glazunov: Violin Concerto Nicola Benedetti (violin), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kirill Karabits (Decca)

And so it comes to an end. Six months, 33 concerts, and many miles of travelling later, The Sixteen’s annual Choral Pilgrimage is now finished for another year. With so many concerts it’s inevitable that the singers’ relationship to the repertoire evolves and develops; the performances we heard last night will not have been those the audience at St John’s College, Cambridge experienced back in April. So what is the effect of living so intimately with this small handful of works?

It felt oddly disrespectful showing up in time for Schumann's wake on the fifteenth and final day of this year's Oxford Lieder Festival. Having started with the early piano music and many of the chamber works before moving on to Schumann's annus mirabilis of song, 1840, with frequent leaps backwards to influences and forwards to the influenced, pianist Sholto Kynoch’s labour of love reached the troubled final years dogged by whatever that insanity for which Schumann was institutionalised might have been – bipolarity, syphilis, poisoning for the mercury used in its treatment.

What a relief to find Semyon Bychkov back on romantic terra firma after his slow-motion Mozart at the Royal Opera (performances speeded up somewhat, I'm told, after a sticky first night). On his own, dark-earth terms, there's no-one to touch him for nuanced phrasing, strength of purpose and the devoted responsiveness he wins from the BBC Symphony Orchestra - foot-stamping its approval at the end, a rarity - in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.

Josquin: Masses The Tallis Scholars/Peter Philips (Gimmell)

Osmo Vänskä isn't by any means the only Finn who conducts magnificent Sibelius. Sakari Oramo is the BBC Symphony Orchestra's property, but the London Philharmonic could have gone for a change and invited Vänskä's equally impressive and even more experienced successor at the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Okko Kamu. Still, they played safe by repeating their success with this combination in 2010, adding British string concertos, and why not?