Grand projects are delectable. Four years ago, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra embarked on a survey of the complete — really complete — works of Stravinsky, also involving the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and IgorFest reached its final three concerts last week, culminating, inevitably, with The Rite of Spring. The second, shared with the New London Chamber and Exaudi choirs, was devoted to biblical pieces, among them the rarely heard A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer. I caught the first, a collaboration with Jeffrey Skidmore’s Ex Cathedra choir, comprising the neoclassical Orpheus ballet and Symphony in C, and late scores exemplifying Stravinsky’s reinvention of himself as a vanguard (wholly convincing) serialist: Introitus — TS Eliot in Memoriam, Variations — Aldous Huxley in Memoriam and Requiem Canticles. Stravinsky’s arrangement of Bach’s chorale variations on Vom Himmel Hoch completed this intriguing programme, bristling with unusual sonorities.

The 12-tone music is difficult to bring off — the balances between the blocks of sound, printed with plenty of white space around them in the score, have little precedent in tradition, and Stravinsky’s lapidary invention routinely demands a tremendous incisiveness from the performers — but so is a work such as Orpheus. I wished that the generally admirable conductor Jac van Steen’s account of this intricately figured (1948) piece had been at once more biting and warmer-toned. It had the wrong kind of coolness, that of tentativeness. Requiem Canticles, with its demand for a sublime iciness, a crystalline precision, fared better, and the five-minute Huxley Variations could not fail to astonish with its stark brilliance; but I imagine the Rite came off more authoritatively in every way.

A less grand project, but yielding much insight and satisfaction, was curated by the Schubert Ensemble at London’s Kings Place. In five concerts over four days, Finding Fauré drew attention to the composer’s late chamber works, relished by connoisseurs, but seldom aired. The pianist William Howard and the violinist Simon Blendis spoke arrestingly of the pitch of intensity to which Fauré brought his art, an intensity inseparable from refined and seamless surfaces. Their performance of the Violin Sonata No 2, Op 108 (1916), made me reflect that, with his wildly roving harmony, Fauré was not so far from modernism. The account of the Piano Quintet No 2, Op 115, fulfilled the high expectations the duo had raised for it, deeming it Fauré’s greatest work. Its unremitting flow of argument amounts to perpetual development, another modernist idea; a shibboleth, indeed, of Boulez’s. And Howard’s solo recital, matching Fauré’s Nocturnes and Impromptus with examples by Chopin and Schubert, beautifully demonstrated the ambitious scale of Fauré Nocturnes such as Nos 6 and 13, and how, compared to the twilight mood of Chopin’s, they really partake of the night. They are more like Whistler’s.

The sculptor Anish Kapoor is the first guest artistic director of the Brighton Festival, which also has a new chief executive, Andrew Comben. Kapoor’s works are spread across the city. A particularly grand one, Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc, specially commissioned, is sited on the floor of the disused Old Municipal Market, a cubic capacity not far short of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which Kapoor has memorably filled. Two earthen pyramids, a huge central cavity and a giant, splayed-out pair of footless (polystyrene and resin) limbs — the ensemble drenched in blood-red — readily signify the endlessly thought-provoking female martyr.

On Monday, the work was twice transmuted into a musical experience. Chamber Domaine and their conductor, Thomas Kemp, were joined by the mezzo-soprano Anna Grevelius, poised in angelic white on a white platform between the pyramidal “breasts”, for Rossini’s short, late cantata Giovanna d’Arco, arranged by the composer Salvatore Sciarrino. He hasn’t done more than faithfully raise a piano part into an orchestral one. There are none of the whispery harmonics of his own manner, and the disjunction between musical historicism and visual modernism was apparent. But it was just the sort of crazily unsuspected event that festivals are supposed to provide. And screaming seagulls added gusto.

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