Benjamin Britten’s take on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is coruscatingly original, yet its only airing scheduled for this centenary year – courtesy of young singers from the European Opera Centre - has briefly come and gone in Liverpool. And if it wasn’t an unalloyed success, Bernard Rozet’s production did at least make a valiant attempt to engage with the multiple challenges which this remake of a remake presents.

Sharpness and sweetness combine attractively in Sylvia Schwartz's voice.

On 8 July 1917, far removed from the carnage of Flanders and the unravelling of the Kerensky Offensive, Leos Janacek noted a fragment of melody for a woman identified as "Mrs C". After a lifetime of infatuations and infidelities, the 63-year-old Czech composer was falling in love for the last time, in the Moravian spa town of Luhacovice. But the initial "C" (for Camilla) was wrong. The inflexions of this scrap of music were inspired by the chatter of Kamila Stosslova, a 25-year-old married woman.

The programme could not have been more felicitously constructed: three Central European string quartets, composed during a two-year period in the Twenties when Modernism had just found its voice.

A third composer hovers, ghost-like, in pianist Cheng's beguiling recital with the Calder Quartet.

All the nice girls love a sailor. But so do the mad girls and the bad girls. Exquisitely bored by the monotonous hum and click of sewing machines and knitting needles in a snowbound fishing village, Senta annihilates herself for love of the cursed hero of The Flying Dutchman. Enraged by rejection, and pressed on all sides by the complex politics of an uneasy military alliance, the sorceress Medea slaughters her children and poisons her rival to wring hot tears from the cold eyes of unfaithful Jason.

One of the more interesting of the tide of Britten centenary tributes, The Canticles features the five vocal settings composed at various points between 1947 and 1974, in which the ostensible religious themes disguise more secular interests – the barely veiled homoeroticism of Francis Quarles' 17th-century adoration of Christ in "Canticle I", the allegorical linking of Blitz and Crucifixion in the Edith Sitwell poem used for "Canticle III" etc.

"La Senna Festeggiante" is a serenata, a secular cantata usually performed al fresco in the evening, and written for a specific occasion – in this case, a 1726 tripartite tribute to the French Ambassador, the French king Louis XV, and arts patron Cardinal Ottoboni.

Klaus Florian Vogt's youthful passion and exuberance seemed to have ushered in a new age of heroic tenor singing with last year's Helden collection.

Everyone loves Carmen, but no one ever quite brings it off because its delicate balance between public and private, large-scale action and intimate drama, is so tricky.

Little by little Maxim Vengerov is easing himself back into the mainstream, after injury and burn-out. His last Barbican foray - with a concerto - was marred by a loss of nerve at critical moments: this time he was going for broke with a chamber recital where, if anything went wrong, he would have nowhere to hide.

David McVicar’s production of Charpentier’s Médée – or Medea, in Christopher Cowell‘s felicitously idiomatic translation – is the most brilliant show to have graced the Coliseum in years. It’s by turns bold and brash – how could it not be, given the tabloid luridness of its subject matter? – and it’s also irresistibly seductive, as befits one of French Baroque music’s most ravishing scores which, after three centuries, is getting its first professional British staging.

In their beautifully balanced survey of Beethoven's Sonatas for Violin and Piano, Kavakos and Pace allow us to eavesdrop on 10 intimate conversations between musical equals.

Welsh National Opera's bloody spree is packed with visual shocks but the finest artistry is in the pit

Khatia Buniatishvili and Alice Sara Ott have more than their youth and keyboard skill in common: they both enjoy the dubious privilege of being their record companies’ pianistic pin-ups.