Budapest Festival Orchestra
Barbican, London EC2

Magdelena Kozena
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1

Macbeth
Opera Holland Park, London W11

From the top of the Wellington Arch, at Hyde Park Corner, you can see into all sorts of places you're not supposed to. How apt, therefore, that I was up there last weekend for the launch of BBC Radio 3's The Beethoven Experience, as down below the BBC Concert Orchestra played his 'Wellington's Victory' to a highly appreciative gallery.

Each time I have dipped into Radio 3's unprecedented, week-long celebration, performing Beethoven's every work, including some rich rarities, I have been reminded of the great man's ability to peer into forbidden places, not least the darker recesses of the human heart.

The high point came on the first evening, when I got home exhausted to be revitalised by Alfred Brendel discussing and playing the piano sonatas with an eloquence - in both departments - only he can muster.

Before the BBC got started, the Barbican presented the rare treat of that fine pianist Richard Goode playing all five concerti of, yes, you've guessed it, Beethoven. Nos 4 and 5 will follow in the autumn, over two concerts with the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer. Goode, meanwhile, played the first three in the elegant, understated style which is his refreshing trademark.

In Bartók sandwiches, prepared with no more than average conviction by Fischer, Goode's attention to detail was as welcome as his modest platform manner, to the point of using the orchestral grand just hammered by someone else in 'The Dance Suite'.

It's a deceptive modesty, as Goode is a poet of the piano, a master of expressive nuance and harmonic subtleties, with a feather-light touch. His interaction with Fischer was exemplary, lending a thrill to bravura passages and a pin-drop potency to the slow movements.

Less visible than usual during the past year (while bearing Simon Rattle's baby), Czech mezzo Magdalena Kozená returned to the South Bank with an eclectic recital that finished up demonstrating the limited range of her gifts, for all the sprightly accompaniment of Malcolm Martineau. An immaculate singer, with a crystalline voice only occasionally stretched on sustained notes at the top of the register, Kozená trades surprisingly short in the charm department.

In the first half, largely folk songs from her homeland by Dvorák and Martinu, her limpid singing was enough to beguile a packed house, the odd theatrical arm gesture passing muster to underline the story she was telling (usually from the male point of view). The same proved true of a polished rendering of Britten's Four French Folksongs, which also showed her mastery of other tongues.

After the interval, the pace changed with overtly theatrical songs by Ravel and Mussorgsky, whose 'Detskaya' (or 'Nursery' suite) gave Kozená the chance to play both nanny and recalcitrant child. This she handled in self-conscious style, giving us a 'shy Di' smile at the end of each number in an awkward attempt to play winsome.

The Ravel sets were, like Mallarmé's poems, much more grown-up; elegant, suave, subtly crafted, the high point of the recital.

On a perfect summer evening, Opera Holland Park hit the ground running with a distinguished production of Verdi's Macbeth by that venturesome director Olivia Fuchs, conducted in high style by John Gibbons.

Not since Peter O'Toole's notorious Old Vic Macbeth 25 years ago can so much blood have permeated a London stage; but, this time around, it's worth it, vividly suggesting a malign world order in which the murderous thane and his sleepwalking wife are but passing pawns.

The discovery of the evening is the melodious Lady Macbeth of Miriam Murphy, a young Irish soprano with a big voice and assured presence, who could go far if she learns from the lessons of Deborah Voigt.

Murphy and the stolid Macbeth of Icelandic baritone Olafur Sigurdarson rattle the tent supports with their stentorian exchanges. As Macduff, the resonant young Italian-American tenor Leonardo Capalbo fulfils the considerable promise he has shown elsewhere.

The chorus also merits an honourable mention, especially the witches, who raise the temperature by stripping down to torn-tight tartdom. For once, Fuchs's slow-motion battle scenes do not irritate; they top and tail an enthralling evening of opera as top theatre.

A rare (for Holland Park) venture into the heavyweight repertoire, Macbeth is playing in tandem with another operatic exploration of sleep-walking, Bellini's La Sonnambula. The mid-season brings Puccini's Madame Butterfly and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, followed into August by Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Giordano's Andrea Chenier.

If it keeps up these standards, Opera Holland Park can call itself the best stately-pile opera house outside Glyndebourne.