Anyone who saw or attended this year’s Last Night of the Proms will know that Marin Alsop is a born communicator with a wry sense of humour. Another of those youthful crowds The Rest is Noise festival keeps attracting gave her a hero’s welcome last night, and she responded with easy compering.

They called Rita Moreno the triple threat – she could dance, act and sing. But even her spirited performance as Anita in West Side Story could not satisfy United Artists: the doomy low notes of "A Boy Like That" were considered out of her range, and the number was ghosted by Betty Wand, one of the scores of unknown singers who rescued on-stage stars from ignominy.

John Cage: As Is Alexei Lubimov (piano, prepared piano), Natalia Pschenitschnikova (voice) (ECM)

Why so many empty seats at last night’s Prom? Bringing together several choruses, a percussion-augmented orchestra, dancers, actors, rock-band and children’s choir, Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is surely a Proms dream – a genuinely eclectic work with something for just about everybody. But even as some 11 different Welsh ensembles sung, jived, clapped and shouted for our entertainment yesterday, there was no getting away from the issues with Bernstein’s ageing, mongrel score.

Brigham Young University in Utah is the largest private university in America, and is probably best known for its affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, AKA the Mormons. What’s less commonly known is that the university also has a choir (four different choirs, in fact) that is among the finest collegiate ensembles in the US.

The cultural triumvirate of the Hallé Orchestra, the Royal Exchange Theatre and The Lowry have joined forces for this new production of the 1953 hit musical Wonderful Town. Leonard Bernstein would surely have been a happy man to hear his score, dashed off in a mere five weeks at short notice, played by the 65-strong Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder, who has been nursing the ambition to do the show here since he saw the 2004 Broadway production.  

Fisher has pizzazz and a gift for comedy

When West Side Story won 10 Academy Awards, that was back in a Hollywood era during which movie musicals regularly garnered such acclaim.

This week we’ve some pioneering, trailblazing Mahler with a dramatic twist, courtesy of a conductor who mentored Leonard Bernstein. Elsewhere, there are some disconcerting, dark sounds from a youthful German composer, and a supremely entertaining disc of highly theatrical vocal works courtesy of Paul Hillier’s immaculately drilled Theatre of Voices. Turn on, tune in and drop out while listening to Cathy Berberian’s cartoon-inspired Stripsody, and consider the very question of what constitutes music.

It was Leonard Bernstein who declared of English music that it was “too much organ voluntary in Lincoln Cathedral, too much Coronation in Westminster Abbey, too much lark ascending, too much clodhopping on the fucking village green”. Fey, whimsical and faintly patterned with chintz – English music doesn’t always get the best press. In the hands of the Britten Sinfonia however, it defies any notion of pastel prettiness, stepping out in only the feistiest and most glorious Technicolor.

There had been murmurings that his star had dimmed. That Gustavo Dudamel's partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (greeted with such fanfare in 2009) had yet to set the West Coast on fire. Had this Icarus flown too high? Would their debut visit to the Barbican last night resemble Breughel's fall, Latino legs flailing in an orchestral sea? Not a bit of it.