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The cover is eye-catching: viola player Antoine Tamestit caught mid-scream, mouth wide open. There is a musical point to the image too. In Jörg Widmann’s 2015 Viola Concerto, written for Tamestit, the soloist becomes a theatrical figure who roams around the orchestra, leaving the usual spot near the conductor. And Widmann, actually a clarinettist by training, fully exploits the viola’s capabilities. Extended techniques – waving the bow through the air, tapping the wood, and yes, even shouting – turn the viola into a one-man-band.

A hero in his native Hungary, where he is acknowledged as the greatest of Wagnerians by most who have been lucky enough to hear his regular Budapest Ring cycles, Adam Fischer is less known to the rest of the world than his often-touring brother Iván. That he’s capable of equally great Mahler is evidenced by this third instalment – and the first I’ve come across – in his cycle with the Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra, not an ensemble with which many of us will be familiar. Well, this should make us grateful for the elder Fischer’s presence there. 

Recorded straight after the Monteverdi Choir’s European tour in 2016 celebrating Christmas in JS Bach’s Leipzig, this festive programme irons out many of the misgivings commentators had of the live performances. In the acoustics of St Jude’s, Hampstead, Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s step-out soloists are consistently strong, and their varied contributions mirror the alluring array of affects achieved by the ensemble as a whole.

Despite its sugary title and frothy cover, this disc features music-making of the highest order and a rigorously researched programme of Baroque arias with obbligato cello – a sweet duel (or ‘dolce duello’) between the human voice and the then young instrument, oft praised for its vocal qualities. Long-term friends and colleagues, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli and cellist Sol Gabetta make for valiant duelling partners who converse, parry and riposte in spirited combat.

With the centenary of Polish independence this year, we are likely to hear more of Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), the virtuoso pianist-composer who was a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles and served as Poland’s first prime minister. His magnificent Piano Concerto (1888) has never quite disappeared and virtuosos have recorded it; outstanding versions include those by Earl Wild, Barbara Hesse-Bukowska, Kevin Kenner and Nelson Goerner, and perhaps significantly the work appeared (played by Piers Lane) on Vol. 1 of Hyperion’s now epic Romantic Piano Concerto series.

The Rite of Spring does not dominate here, not because the performance is lame. Rather, it is part of something truly exceptional, joined here by masterpieces from Webern, Berg and Ligeti in performances of outstanding beauty, passion and power. This film captures a concert at the Barbican from January 2015, when the public courtship between the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle was still ongoing and their artistic marriage not yet certain.

Few performances of Tchaikovsky’s angst-ridden symphonic masterpiece have encapsulated the overwhelming passion of its musical argument to the same degree as this brilliantly recorded account. Teodor Currentzis has a clear and unified vision of the music’s trajectory, his interpretation grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and compelling you to follow its relentlessly tortured path from first bar to last. 

The word ‘sacred’ can also mean ‘set apart’, which may explain the strange fate of Sibelius’s Tapiola. Routinely it’s listed among the composer’s supreme achievements, yet it’s hardly ever heard in concert. When it appears on record it’s usually as a coupling, and even then conductors seem disinclined to take any risks with it. It’s marvellous then to find a conductor taking a genuinely fresh approach. Hannu Lintu’s Tapiola isn’t the grey, remote expanse so many make of it.

The concept of cultural appropriation was mercifully unknown to the composers of 19th-century France. We can therefore sit back and enjoy their daydreams in Mirages, compiled around visions of faraway or imaginary lands and people, dominated by Oriental exoticism. Sabine Devieilhe’s voice is shown off to stunning effect as she and her colleagues bring together the (sometimes) kitschier side of eastern longings and the lingering influence of such sounds on more intriguing music. 

Western jazz musicians were exploring Arabic music and maqams(modes) half a century ago, long before ‘world music’ became a scene.

Quite a double whammy, this. Not only is the programme as a whole both satisfying and unusual, but also Rosanne Philippens’s startling partnership with the excellent St Gallen Symphony Orchestra and Otto Tausk puts her Prokofiev Second Violin Concerto right at the top of the many recent recordings – her (Dutch) compatriot Janine Jansen’s included. This most natural of concerto recordings was made in St Gallen’s Tonhalle, which must be very fine on this evidence.

This outstanding CD from the Istanbul-based Borusan Quartet explores a diverse collection of modern string quartets with tremendous spirit and poise. Arvo Pärt’s restless Summa (1977), an early example of the composer’s ‘tintinnabuli’ style, opens the disc. It is paired with Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 2 (1983), originally composed to accompany a staged adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novel Company and here performed with apt intensity and precision.

From Claudio Arrau and Fou T’song to Ivan Moravec and Maria João Pires, the Chopin discography is rich in sets of the complete Nocturnes, any of which can stand as a ‘library choice’. But this outstanding new release from Nelson Goerner proves that there is always room for another. While listening to Goerner, no one could reasonably claim to be missing any of these greats, so complete is his grasp of Chopin’s style.

Those of a cynical disposition might be inclined to suspect that Alamire’s tribute to Thomas Tallis runs the risk of shortchanging its listeners: the epic Gaude gloriosa Dei mater is repeated at the end of the CD – albeit sporting the respray of freshly-conceived English words by Queen Katherine Parr – and nearly 17 minutes are given over to a Litany alternating chanted declamation with simple repeating refrains. Repetition, after all, accounts for more than a third of the disc. They couldn’t be more wrong.

One of my music teachers loftily pronounced that the Sinfonia Antarticawas not a real symphony, but merely film music. He would surely have been silenced by what conductor Martin Yates has uncovered here – essentially a huge forgotten work on, as the notes put it, ‘a quasi-symphonic canvas’, which Vaughan Williams composed in full before even a frame of the film itself was shot – apparently in a fervent three weeks. 

This is the last of Warner’s annual gleanings from the Lugano Festival at which Martha Argerich presides – and definitely the most exciting. She may be 76, but her playing has lost none of its phenomenal precision and brilliance; it’s a rare pleasure to hear her playing solo in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, which she has never before committed to disc. In every shared track she induces her ‘friends’ – including the excellent Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana – to raise their game to a level with hers.

The art of vocal duetting is exemplified at its best in this recital by two of today’s finest British singers, working with an accompanist of equal merit. The title track, Lost is My Quiet, is a Purcell setting heard here (as with the remaining five items by the composer) in Benjamin Britten’s clever realisation: applying considerable judgement to their task, the voices of Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies are well matched here in terms of colour and vibrancy – an accomplishment they deliver throughout.