What to make of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, which began a week-long residency at London’s Vaudeville Theatre last night and which tours in the new year? A success “from Sydney to Seattle” apparently, with Elaine Paige having called it “amazing” and various regional newspapers offering superlatives.

Josquin: Missa Gaudeamus, Missa L’ami Baudichon The Tallis Scholars/Peter Phillips (Gimell)

The young Dublin folk trio fuse vocal harmonies with superb acoustic musicianship, primarily on cello, fiddle and Nyckelharpa. They bring together Irish and Nordic – specifically Finnish – folk traditions, building them to dizzying heights on a foundation of acoustic drones and group interplay.

Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.

Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brilliance

Karine Polwart has a stellar track record as a pop and folk songwriter and interpreter of traditional songs, from Malinky through a solo career that has garnered six BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including Folk Singer Of The Year 2018.

It's a little hard to compliment KT Tunstall without seeming a little snitty. Her music is familiar, it's grown-up, it's Radio 2, it's full of lashings of Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, The Pretenders, Springsteen, Nashville, Laurel Canyon.

2017 was a year in which Paul Weller reminded us all why he’s a force to be reckoned with. An impressive foray into the world of soundtracks (the score to Johnny Harris’s Jawbone) was followed by A Kind Revolution, which was, for the most part, a very impressive collection. This year sees yet another album from an artist who is clearly mining a rich seam of form. 

It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect choice for the prelapsarian American forests of his pre-Grimes operetta/musical Paul Bunyan.

Paul Simon is currently traversing the globe on his Farewell Tour. His new album clearly accompanies that. It’s a thoughtful look backwards wherein Simon has plucked numbers from his catalogue he feels deserve another go-round, recording them with guest artists, often from the world of jazz (notably Wynton Marsalis). It is, by its nature, somewhat self-indulgent, for there are none of his most famous songs here. These are numbers he wants to bring out of the shadows; that he reckons are worth further attention. On occasion, he’s absolutely right.

The album opens with "One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor", originally a chugging rock’n’roll frolic on 1973’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. It has become a faintly Christmassy piano jazz shuffle that recalls Cab Calloway. It’s not unpleasant, not better, just different. The singer is famed for the pithy wit of his songwriting and, at the album’s best, he grabs the listener by the mind and heartstrings. A good case in point is “Darling Lorraine” from 2000’s You’re the One (from which four of this 10-song set are drawn). The poignancy was arguably submerged on the original’s twangy “adult contemporary” arrangement but here, in more pared-back form, the song is affecting.

Elsewhere New York chamber sextet yMusic get involved on "Can’t Run But" and "Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War". The latter is a particularly literary song and the delicate orchestrations forefront the ache at its heart. Something about it recalls Al Stewart.

I suppose your preference regarding these versions and their originals depends on your relationship with Paul Simon. I possess none of his records and his existence generally passes me by. Music journalists should occasionally make such matters clear with artists who have long, storied careers. It tempers the relevance of what they have to say. From where I’m standing, then, In The Blue Light is an album that, in some places, has a delicate beauty, but in others, overeggs the pudding towards sentimentalism.

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There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions.