Tinkles from the Royal Albert Hall organ

French organist Thierry Escaich offered a fascinating musical journey with a programme which juxtaposed the organ music of J S Bach with responses to it by Mendelssohn and Brahms, as well his own improvisations on themes by Bach.

Tonight’s Orchestre de Paris Prom was very much a concert of two halves, in the first of which they got to show their sensitive, introspective side, reflecting on the nature of life and lamenting too-early death, then becoming considerably more extrovert in the second for some free-spirited buccaneering, and what the programme notes describe as “vivid, prolonged and grand noise”.

Le chef d'orchestre s'est montré très inspiré dans un programme riche et varié à la Philharmonie, avec Lisa Batiashvili, François Leleux et Thierry Escaich en invités de marque.

Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge is paired with Haydn's Die sieben letzten Worte, a journey from agony to transcendence in which the agony proves the more honest companion.

From Three Screaming Popes to Pictures at an Exhibition, a pair of works inspired by paintings frame a violin concerto by Béla Bartók at London's Southbank Centre. 

With a spring in his step, Evgeny Kissin returns to Barbican Hall and gives well-wrought accounts of Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and Schumann.