After the myriad intricacies and moodswings of Janáček's The Makropulos Case on Tuesday and Thursday - I was lucky to catch both performances, the second even more electrifying than the first - the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle seemed to be enjoying a relative holiday last night.

Marketed as “City Noir” to begin with, this programme title was switched to “Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4” closer to the off, perhaps because the more familiar of the two main items in it would ring more bells with potential attenders. Unsurprisingly, it proved a thing of two halves, with Beethoven in the first, and John Adams’ self-described symphony inspired by Los Angeles, from 2009, in the second.

Director Bill Barclay’s new collaboration with the Gesualdo Six – commissioned by St Martin-In-The Fields for its 300^th anniversary – brings an opulent intensity to its depiction of a man whose troubled existence was reflected in darkly ravishing music. Gesualdo’s life was in many ways the counterpoint to Christ’s – born into privilege, he allowed himself to be defined by lust and a murderous thirst for revenge. So it’s one of his many disturbing paradoxes that he identified so strongly with Jesus’s suffering.

Our most adventurous guitarist never does anything twice, at least not in quite the same form. Days after a recital in Dublin's Royal Irish Academy of Music, he included several items from that programme in a unique three-parter.

Anna Lapwood may not be the only virtuoso organist to celebrate the centenary of Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie concertante this year, but with her performance with the Hallé under Katharina Wincor she was almost certainly the first. It’s one of the most taxing – if only for the sheer stamina required of its soloist – and multi-faceted works for organ and orchestra ever written.

To the great Weill interpreters she summoned at the start of her First person for theartsdesk, from Cathy Berberian to Tom Waits, can now be added mezzo-soprano Katie Bray's contribution. The hour's worth of songs from the German, French and American eras she presented in the perfect Fidelio Cafe setting, the wintry night outside and cosiness within evoking Berlin or Vienna haunts, didn't include everything that's on her new CD, but it all made perfect sense, and saved the most emotional until last.

Composer Zoë Martlew’s album (Album Z) launch in the surround-sound environment of Hall 2 at Kings Place thrived on a theatricality rare outside the world of rock music and clubs. A wondrously energetic person, overflowing with a generosity and capacity for heartfelt relationship, Martlew thrives on high drama, as a performer as well as a person, with an almost child-like joy in making music that’s irresistibly contagious.

Never mind the singing, Roderick Williams could have been a great TV presenter or even stand-up, on the evidence of his spoken introduction at the Wigmore Hall last night. It was the best pre-concert speech I’ve heard for a long time – relaxed, witty, authoritative and engaging – and this is not damning with faint praise, as the recital that followed was completely delightful.

Conducting the staple Viennese fare of New Year's Day is no easy task. Quite apart from the basic essential panache - so drearily missing from Austrian Franz Welser-Möst's 2023 shot in Vienna itself, abundantly present this year from live wire Yannick Nézet-Séguin - there has to be the right space for the upbeat to the waltz, freedom in the melodies, energy but not mania in the fast polkas. 

Concert one-offs can be experiences to last a lifetime (immediately springing to mind is Jakub Hrůša’s BBC Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich 11). But this has been a year above all for the best of festival planning, the sort where you feel enriched by connecting threads.