For those of us who can't hear Vladimir Jurowski's intriguing LPO programme on Saturday night live - Gergiev calls over at the Barbican, in a typically frustrating London clash - all is not lost. We'll be able to hear it from 4 October streamed via the London Philharmonic website or the LPO iPhone application. Six more concerts can be heard this way throughout the season.

In general, I’m no particular fan of composers talking in public about their own music. My family suggests that this is because I’m hoping to get the job of talking about it myself. But the real reason is that, on the whole, composers don’t tell the truth about their work – and indeed why should they? Creative work is a mysterious and impenetrable process, and it’s a very modern, right-to-know sort of assumption that those who do it should also be able to explain it. Probably nobody is. But people naturally suppose that when the horse opens its mouth, the oracle will speak.

English National Opera's new production of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle is photographed here by Johan Persson. Directed by Daniel Kramer, designed by Giles Cadle and lit by Peter Mumford, it updates Charles Perrault's 1697 fairytale to a horrific modern reality. Clive Bayley and Michaela Martens sing Duke Bluebeard and Judith. See Ismene Brown's review.

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There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the picture. Cases where men abduct girls and turn them into sex slaves and father multiple children by them, often incestuously, hiding them in garages, basements, behind walls, sometimes for decades undiscovered, sometimes murdering them. Mostly you read that it happened, you shudder, and try not to think more about it.