It's always wise to keep a spare orchestra up your sleeve. Luckily the Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden, still a well-kept secret in this country but causing excitement in concert halls and opera houses across the world, has several. When his Dallas Symphony had to cancel their European tour because of the dollar crisis, his Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra stepped in, obligingly sticking to the same repertoire. Van Zweden is music director of both, and associated with several others, including the most illustrious, from Chicago and Cleveland to Oslo and Munich.
At 49 and shaven-headed, he cannot be put in the bubbly-haired youth category of those rising stars nearly 20 years younger. Yet he's mentioned in the same breath. In the UK he has conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra a few times but hasn't even made his debut Proms yet (though expect to find his name when the programme is announced next month). Where has he been hiding?
The answer is remarkable. As a 19-year-old violinist he was snapped up by Bernard Haitink and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw to become the youngest ever leader of a world-class symphony orchestra. There he remained, sitting under the nose of superstar conductors and watching closely how it's done, until a decade ago, when he laid down his bow and took up a baton. It's a short distance from front desk to podium but a challenging journey surprisingly rarely made.
This week van Zweden, the young Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski and the Netherlands RPO have been on tour in the UK. If Birmingham's all-Russian programme was the measure, this was first-class music-making. Trpceski gave a scintillating account of Prokofiev's knotty third piano concerto, managing to bring a bendy, relaxed manner to the spiky, motoric figurations.
The second movement theme and variations had an improvisatory feel, as if Trpceski, jazzily noodling up and down the keyboard, had suddenly whisked us from the comfort of Symphony Hall to a cocktail bar. After, in response to noisy cheers from a stunned audience, he charmed us with the tiny march from Prokofiev's Musiques d'enfants as an encore, a mere 34 bars (and nearly as many key changes) of sparky pleasure.
Rachmaninov's ever popular Symphony No 2 occupied the second half. The woodwind, wistfully prominent in the Prokofiev, continued to display plangent flair in this soulful, hour-long work. But the night belonged to the strings (no doubt benefiting from their music director's fiddling past), who had the drill, definition and control needed to keep this work fresh and muscular. The sound was alarming: white-hot, raw, percussive; rosin and horse hair flying. If holding your breath and digging your fingernails into your hands for nearly 60 minutes, in ear-bending concentration, were a form of workout, I'd be fit.
At the Southbank, for the third time already this year following Daniel Barenboim and Kristian Zimerman, another great pianist was causing queues, extra seating on stage and standing ovations. Maurizio Pollini's Chopin recital was always going to be an "event", and so it proved. Having begun his career, aged 18, by winning the 1960 Warsaw Chopin competition, he immediately did the unthinkable and withdrew from public life in order to grow up and study repertoire. This created a cult of fascination around the cool, intellectual Italian which has endured. Now 68, his golden reputation remains undimmed.
The concerts, however, can be unsettling, his playing at times clotted in giddily fast counterpoint, giving a reined in sense where freedom is needed. Pollini opened with the 24 preludes. In his 2004 London recital he played them after the interval, which may be a better place. Neither he, nor we, given the serious and widespread bronchial angst which wrecked the performance, were ready for the intensity of these jewel-like short works. But the No 17 in A flat, a favourite of Clara Schumann and Mendelssohn, as well as mere mortals, myself included, rose out of the mists and worked its glimpse-of-heaven spell, as did his account of the Nocturne No 2 in D flat Op 27. Together with Zimerman last week, they will last me the rest of this Chopin 200th anniversary year.
Pimlico Opera's trip to prison has now been an annual event for 20 years, during which some 50,000 members of the public have gone 'inside' and several hundred inmates have tasted the limelight, working with young professionals, in ways few ever expected. This year was Carmen in HMP Wandsworth, cut down to under two hours, directed by Olivia Fuchs and surviving gutsily intact.
Only five of the prisoners participating – whose nationalities included Polish, Romanian, Uzbechi and Turkish – spoke English. Carmen herself was voluptuously and smokily sung by Frances Bourne, who gave a fearlessly physical performance despite being seven months pregnant. The cast, pros and ams, ins and outs, worked with a great sense of team spirit. You can pontificate, with good reason, about the mutual benefits of an enterprise like this. But it's simpler just to say that in all senses this Carmen was a captivating show.
