BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff

Noisy Vaughan Williams symphony is a Royal College of Music period piece

It’s a neat-sounding idea for a concert: a sequence of works composed in the year the previous composer died. Neat, but not necessarily revealing. This one started with Elgar’s Cockaigne, composed – symbolically, I assume – in 1900, and ended with Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, completed in 1934, the year of Elgar’s death. In between came Britten’s Nocturne, written in VW’s last year, 1958. With a little more time, they might have added Birtwistle’s Melancolia (1976, Britten), and left everyone completely bemused.

The Kingdom, London Symphony Orchestra, Elder, Barbican Hall

Elgar and Susan Gritton show off the genius of early and Anglican Christianity

So Starbucks-like is its reach, so tarnished its modern legacy, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the ideology of Christianity is. How seductively counterintuitive the idea of a God who was not just a man but a bum of a man must have seemed. Not until the Arab warrior Muhammed came to his calling was Christianity's first strategy seriously challenged.

Elgar's Enigma - A Love Child Named Pearl?

Tantalising evidence of the composer's secret double life as he composed The Kingdom

UPDATE 2015: Four years ago, in January 2011, I wrote this article about the music critic and biographer Michael Kennedy's search for the missing portion of Elgar's life. It identified a Mrs Dora Nelson as the composer's mistress and mother of a lovechild, who might have influenced some legendarily enigmatic aspects of Elgar's compositional output. A new development opened when an Arts Desk reader contacted me, who had taken up Kennedy's and my requests for others to pick up this unsolved mystery.

Elgar: The Man Behind the Mask, BBC Four

John Bridcut's documentary probes the great composer's uneasy, troubled soul

Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in each of them, and more. John Bridcut’s painfully sensitive documentary hones in on the private, introspective Elgar, the dark knight of "ghosts and shadows", always with the music to the fore. And by getting the good and great, young and old of the musical world not just to talk but to react to the works as they hear them, he may have broken new ground.

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis, Barbican

Elgar's Shakespearean humanity and Delius's nature dwarf a new commission

Elgar and Delius are two geniuses who only ever composed themselves - the first drawing heavily on psychology and physiognomy, the second drenching his country visions in painful nostalgia. So it made good sense to have man and nature side by side in Sir Andrew Davis's latest enterprising concert. Oh, and there was a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society's Elgar Bursary too, though this was only "new" music by the old guard. I suspect that the BBC Symphony players could have done without Edwin Roxburgh's Concerto for Orchestra in a heavy programme, resplendently though they tackled it, and so could I.

The Last Night of the Proms, BBC One: The Twitter Review

The hope and the glory (and the bobbing): part two as it unfolded

Part 2 @bbcproms. The madness begins. Ms Derham has not switched gowns in the interval. No sign of Titchmarsh, for which we must give thanks.

The "traditional" necklace of laurels for Sir Henry Wood's bust. Wonder if he'd welcome his head being polished by a pink rag.

How do they pick these pieces? Apols but the Marche joyeuse did not fill this tweeter with joy. On the other hand, here's Renée plus a mike.

The Kingdom, Three Choirs Festival

World-class singers and orchestra make most of Elgar's flawed oratorio

The Three Choirs Festival is with us again, for the 283rd year – almost as many, it seems, as The Mousetrap: this year we are in Gloucester. Nowadays, though, this great festival is no longer imprisoned, Barchester-like, in the cathedral close, but ranges all over Gloucester city and Gloucestershire, with concerts also in Tewkesbury, Cheltenham, Highnam and Painswick; and its repertoire is likewise much broader than of yore, with plenty of new music, young artists, children’s concerts, and even, quaintly, a pipe and tabor workshop, to go with the familiar Elgar, Finzi, Vaughan Williams and Holst, the organ recitals and the vicarage tea parties, the coach trips and the memorial talks.

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Runnicles, Royal Albert Hall

A glowing programme of works both English and international from Scots on top form

What a quintessential Prom: a quartet of works by English composers which aspire to international status, and in three cases wholly succeed, performed by the BBC's Scottish orchestra at world-class level under its homegrown but deservedly globetrotting chief conductor Donald Runnicles. And doing what the Albert Hall, if handled properly, assists in doing best - not the noisy stuff, but the secret rapture of four increasingly sublime slow movements welcoming us in from the Victorian colosseum's vasts.

Classical Music CDs Round-Up 8

From sackbutts and serialism: this month's releases sifted and sorted

This month the selection varies from sackbutts to serialism, by way of condensed Wagner, Elgar conducted by the much-missed Vernon Handley and music from both Shostakovich and a disciple of his. Among contemporary music there is Osvaldo Golijov’s lively setting of the Passion story and the young German composer Thomas Larcher and the great Henri Dutilleux. There are also more delights from Swiss master Frank Martin. Violin pyrotechnics are supplied by Ysaÿe. But we begin with vintage Gershwin, and that famous looping clarinet.

The Berlin Philharmonic European Concert 2010, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

Thunderous optimism in the annual Europe concert by the crack German players

"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!" The unsung words of cobbler-philosopher Hans Sachs in the third-act prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger might seem like an odd opening manifesto for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's annual May Day ceremonial concert this morning, hosted this year by Oxford in the gorgeous venue where the Berliners had last played under Karajan a very long time ago. But there was method in it. Whether or not Oxford's traditional May Day eve revels last night had any drunken brawl as threatening as the one which set Sachs meditating on human folly there was certainly a bacchanalian atmosphere outside the Sheldonian - and even more to be found inside.