Flawlessly uniting atmosphere and melody is challenging. Especially so when creating music is approached unconventionally and with the desire to be individual. Having set her bar high, Juana Molina triumphs on all counts, again proving herself as a virtuoso artist who executes her vision with enviable assurance.

We live in a time of particularly polarised opinion, and Paul Weller remains a divisive figure. To some he’s the Changing Man, the Modfather, the Most Modernest Modernist that ever was. To others, however, he’s come to represent the very chromosome that turns perfectly good songwriting into "dadrock" and creates the sort of tuneful terrain on which Kasabian can flourish.

From Muswell Hillbilly to Beverly Hillbilly, Ray Davies – Sir Ray – has long been infatuated with America and it must have been a great disappointment when the Kinks were banned from touring there in the mid-1960s. Then in the 1970s and Eighties they were reborn as a stadium rock band, criss-crossing the States and losing their audience back home.

Sharon Shannon’s not yet 50 – and she’s been performing for more than 40 years, joining a band at home in County Clare when she was eight and touring the US with them at 14. Since then she’s worked with an impressive array of artists, from the Waterboys through Steve Earle to Nigel Kennedy. Arguably, it was The Woman’s Heart project (1992), showcasing Irish folk musicians which included Mary Black and Maura O’Connell, that propelled Shannon to international success.

This is a well-travelled Winter’s Tale. Declan Donnellan has long been a director who's as much at home abroad as he is in the UK, and with co-production support here coming pronouncedly from Europe (there's American backing, too), Cheek by Jowl have made it abundantly clear where they stand on the issue of the day.

One thing was very clear at Wednesday night’s BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, held at the Royal Albert Hall – at the moment at least, Scotland has something of a monopoly when it comes to folk music talent.

As Imelda May releases her fifth CD, it can’t but help that Bob Dylan has come out as a fan – it was, she wrote, "like being kissed by Apollo himself". No doubt his buddy T Bone Burnett passed him a copy of the album, for he produced it in Los Angeles, where it was recorded over seven days, with guest appearances from guitarist Jeff Beck and pianist and band leader Jools Holland, on whose TV shows May has guested several times.

The only British gig in Josh Ritter’s so-called work-in-progress tour took place in the somewhat unlikely venue of St Stephen’s Church, Shepherd’s Bush, a rather fine example of gothic revival style. It’s almost opposite Bush Hall, which would have been a more logical venue: an altar was not perhaps the most obvious setting for the Idaho-born alt folkie though the acoustics were splendid.

Mention the name “Barbara Dickson” and everyone remembers “I Know Him so Well”, the duet with Elaine Paige which hit the top spot in 1985, the era of big hair, shoulders pads and dry ice. That song didn’t feature in Dickson’s concert at Union Chapel, but those who came to hear her other top 20 hits – “Answer Me”, “Caravans” and “January February” – weren’t disappointed. The last was the appropriate opener on a frigid February eve, but like everything she played, it was totally reinvented.

Quite deservedly, Dickson has enjoyed considerable commercial success and won awards for her acting (“Tell Me It’s Not True” from Blood Brothers was one of the evening’s many high points; “Across the Universe” from John, Paul George, Ringo… and Bert, another Willy Russell musical and the one which made her a household name, provided the encore) but her heart has always remained deep in the Scottish folk scene from which she emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s, along with artists such as Archie Fisher, Rab Noakes and Gerry Rafferty.

Nothing beats good musicians playing and singing their hearts out

Whichever Barbara drew people to Islington, no one would have returned home disappointed, for she touched all bases (“Some of you are nearly as old as I am”, she joked as the audience applauded the opening bars of golden oldies) in a generous performance: generous in what she gave of herself, generous to her band, and generous in her proper attribution of credit to those behind the songs. Her voice is impeccable still, a rioja gran reserva where once it was a tempranillo, and she’s gifted with astonishing vocal control, including an unexaggerated portamento that allows her to deliver a song in a slow tempo that brings forth all the emotion.

That enviable ability comes to the fore in the Scottish folk songs she performs with both reverence and deep knowledge – the poignant “Palace Grand”, for example, learned from the late Jean Redpath, the singer and collector who left Fife for New York as the 1960s revival drew a callow Bob Dylan to that city (Joan Baez recorded the song as “Lady Mary”.) Other traditional highlights included “MacCrimmon’s Lament”, sung a capella and seguing into an exhilarating Irish jig, which spotlighted Troy Donockley’s Uillian pipework, he riffing on them much as he does on lead guitar, and the majestic “Farewell to Fiunary”, all drums and drone.

There was also Brecht (“The Wife of the Solider”, with its Carthy/Swarbrick lyrics), James Taylor (“Millworker”, a song about sweated labour written before it made headlines for the Broadway musical Working), Dylan, Rafferty, and Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Love Hurts”, a 1960 hit for the Everly Brothers who so captivated the teenage Barbara (check out her duet with Rab Noakes of "Sleepless Nights", overleaf).

Besides Donockley, who also played the Roland Aerophone, a versatile digital wind instrument, the band comprised Nick Holland on keyboards and vocals, Russell Field on percussion and low pipe, and Brad Lang on bass. Dickson occasionally swapped her trusty Martin guitar for the keyboard.

Nothing beats good musicians playing and singing their hearts out. The Union Chapel – where the lighting played on the stained glass, throwing up purple Scottish heather hues – was the perfect venue.

Overleaf: Barbara Dickson and Rab Noakes sing 'Sleepless Nights'

The keeper on Burning the Threshold is “Around the Axis”, a glistening, three-minute instrumental rooted in the finger-picking of Davy Graham’s classic 1961 arrangement of “Anji”. Building from its inspiration, “Around the Axis” deftly interweaves three guitars, suggesting where Graham and other contemporary solo stylists such as Bert Jansch may have gone early on if they had not been lone instrumentalists. It also suggests one aspect of where Pentangle were at in 1969 and a familiarity with the 1966 Bert Jansch/John Renbourn album Bert and John.