Performer: Simon Halsey

Marking their 20th anniversary with a celebratory tour, Les Siècles perform French classics at the Barbican under their twinkle-toed founder, François-Xavier Roth. 

Contemplation and reflection should ideally form a counterpoint to jollity and merry-making in the festive season: an object-lesson from Sir Simon Rattle and his supporting forces.

Sir Antonio Pappano and the LSO offer a riveting account of Il prigioniero, an idiosyncratic 20th-century opera. 

There could be no more appropriate choice than the Glagolitic Mass, with its text of Old Church Slavonic, for a concert which Bychkov had dedicated to the people of Ukraine.

 It is rare for the LSO to take a literal and metaphorical back seat at one of their own concerts, but they supplied every instrumental need in Haydn's joyous oratorio. 

True to himself, Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO offered a mouth-watering programme of contrasts. The first half pointing clearly to the modern world worked better than the backward glance at a great Romantic symphony.