This year’s Aldeburgh Festival – the 76th – takes as its motto a line from Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. The poet speaks of despair “Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound”. With or without words, music shapes and voices feelings that would otherwise lie beyond expression.

The opening and closing concerts of a season tend to be statements of intent – to pursue a path of exploration or (latterly) to celebrate a destination attained. John Storgårds’ final programme of the BBC Philharmonic’s series at the Bridgewater Hall was definitely the latter of those.

For the first encore of the evening, it was not just the audience but the whole ensemble of Hespèrion XXI that was mesmerised as its leader, Jordi Savall, executed a fiendishly rapid sequence of notes that sent the rosin from his bow rising up like smoke. At the age of 83, one of the world’s most influential viol players continues to demonstrate that his genius for teasing out every nuance of baroque allows him to soar through the music as freely as a bird.

If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in recent years have involved Brahms, a composer I love more the older I get: the Second, A major, Piano Quartet, much less often heard than No. 1, at the 2018 Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, and, last Friday, his First String Quartet from the Cuarteto Casals, also new to me, in an airy room looking out on Dublin’s Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.

There was a neat conjunction of commemorations to this concert, the most obvious one being the fact that that 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, so it’s completely appropriate the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to end its season with a concert of his music. More than that, however, the composer himself heard this very orchestra (then called the Scottish National Orchestra) play his Festive Overture in the Usher Hall in 1962, during one of Lord Harewood’s Edinburgh Festivals. 

James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a spectrum of pieces which brim with wit and inventiveness. This lunchtime concert with violinist Anthony Marwood was a sheer joy, as they together traversed a range of style and tone, richly entertaining a very decent Bank Holiday crowd in the Wigmore Hall.

"How long is Wagner’s Ring Cycle?" That’s not the opening to a joke, it’s a genuine question asked by a friend who I’d met up with before heading to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall to hear the Royal Scottish National Orchestra perform "Wagner’s Ring Symphony". His question is one I really don’t know how to answer: technically it’s 15 hours, but does a cycle ever really end? Is a piece of string as long as the ties that bind? How long would it take to wrap up the whole world?

Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern imagination that you can always discover something new, especially given the intense hard work on detail of Antonio Pappano and what is now very much “his” London Symphony Orchestra. They and Lisa Batiashvili also helped to keep Szymanowski’s hothouse First Violin Concerto in focus, too.

Manchester Camerata spent eight years performing and recording a complete edition of Mozart’s piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist, together with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, and inevitably there was the question: what next?

Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two established favourites from big names of the 20^th century plus a new-to-me piece by a forgotten figure worthy of re-discovery.