The British composer Thomas Adès has been writing intricately structured and colorfully orchestrated music for nearly two decades now. Before he became a composer, though, he trained for a career as pianist, and he has the formidable technique and deep musicianship of a great player.

One of my favorite composition teachers once said, “Any buffoon can get a premiere. A real achievement is a repeat performance.”

Last May, I reviewed the Ives Quartet’s premiere of Dan Becker’s work Time Rising. At the time, I was intrigued by its unusual macro structure: three tiny movements — or “ingredients” — followed by a much longer movement: the final product. Hearing the Ives play the work again on Sunday, I knew what to expect, and this time I was struck by its rhythmic complexity and the slowly moving harmony — each first presented as ingredients, then folded into the final piece.

Saturday’s Music at the Mission chamber music concert, at Old Mission San Jose in Fremont, bore the title “Music in the Time of Turmoil: From Conflict to Redemption.” It featured a quartet for the end of time, and another quartet from after the end of time. It was a solid, meaty chamber music concert: not heavy or overlong, just full of provocative 20th-century compositions related to war or inspired by it.

Every time I hear what Gustav Mahler did not call his “Resurrection Symphony” — but others did — I think about what the work must have sounded like to the first listeners 115 years ago. Sure, they had heard “big sounds” from Beethoven and Wagner, though without Stravinsky, Bartók, and others in their ears, what could they have made of Mahler’s dizzying complexity?

Unaccompanied violin recitals are sufficiently rare that the image and bio of Jennifer Koh’s longtime recital partner, pianist Reiko Uchida, made it into the printed program of last Tuesday’s Herbst Theatre recital before San Francisco Performances staff realized their mistake. It would be misleading to say that Uchida (a very fine pianist) was not missed. But Koh by herself was amply capable of holding anyone’s attention.

Sunday evening at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra treated an enthusiastic audience to a Francophilic romp through Europe, titled “The French Suite in Europe.” We started in Stockholm, of all places, with Guillaume Dumanoir’s 17th-century Suite du Ballet de Stockholm. Little is known about this piece, which comes to us from a single manuscript source in Kassel, Germany, a fact that explained the bizarre Franco-Germanic movement designations in the program.

Last week was a big week for Maurice Ravel’s music at Davies Symphony Hall. Hard on the heels of the four San Francisco Symphony subscription concerts that included Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, Sunday evening saw a large, all-Ravel program by the visiting Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under its conductor, Myung-Whun Chung. Yet in a way, the most memorable part of all this was Sunday’s glorious vocalism by mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter.

Patrons flipped over the first half of Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert. A premiere by Victor Kissine pleased all listeners I chatted with, from the conservative to the avant-garde. And soloist Christian Tetzlaff’s subjugation of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto so electrified the audience that he received a prolonged standing ovation, convention be damned, between its first and second movements.