London

London is the world's concert hall with a city attached. No capital supports more professional orchestras — five symphonic ensembles share the calendar before the chamber and period bands are counted — and none stages a festival like the Proms, eight summer weeks that make the Royal Albert Hall the planet's largest classical audience. Handel became English here, Haydn wrote his last symphonies for its rooms, and the trade continues nightly from Covent Garden's opera to Wigmore's chamber recitals to the Barbican and Southbank's twin fortresses of programming.

The concert record's documented addresses tell the intimate version: St Martin-in-the-Fields, Gibbs's porticoed church on Trafalgar Square — a working church that is also one of the world's busiest concert venues, its candlelit evenings and its name carried worldwide by the academy founded there — and the Thames Chamber Orchestra, one of the capital's freelance-borne ensembles whose concerts in such churches are the true ecology of London music-making: an economy of superb players assembling nightly under any name the evening requires.

Beyond the music stands, of course, everything: the Abbey and the Tower, the museums given free to the world, two thousand years of river city from Londinium to the Shard. But the fair summary of London for this register is the simplest one — whatever the repertoire, it is playing here tonight, twice.