People always overlook how much of a hippie Richard Wagner was intellectually. His philosophical stance differs little from that of Neil from The Young Ones. It's a side of Wagner you can't get away from in Tristan und Isolde, with its endless railing against temporal realities and its search for universal oneness - yeah man, oneness.

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.

Rock music doesn’t get much better than this. For two hours, the raggedy Chicago band Wilco poured out song after song from a repertoire that stretches back 15 years, slipping effortlessly between gentle alt-country and avant-garde rock, between the whisperingly quiet and the crushingly loud. They were sensational, a band at the top of their game. And thanks to the immaculate sound system, and the acoustics of this fabulous hall, loudness never tipped over into distortion; everything was there, audible in the mix.

Following the recent UK premiere of his Symphony No 4 ("Los Angeles") at the Proms, Arvo Pärt's 75th birthday celebrations continue with a two-day conference on 24-25 September hosted at London's Southbank Centre. Presented in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music, with the composer in residence, academics from the UK, USA and Canada will give a total of 13 papers on various aspects of Pärt's music over the two days.

The dreadlocks are gone, the dark suit is gone, the acoustic guitar which was his faithful travelling companion during the four years as Brazilian Minister of Culture, is also gone. Instead, Gilberto Gil skipped on stage with a cool, short, grey haircut framing his beautifully sculpted features, wearing a white shirt and check trousers, and strapped on a Fender Stratocaster.

A packed Festival Hall and a cheering, stamping, standing ovation – hardly the usual welcome for an evening of contemporary music. Sitting, wizened and waistcoat-clad, at the centre of the front row was the reason: Ravi Shankar. Framed by the mathematical minimalism of John Adams’ Shaker Loops and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Shankar’s first-ever symphony was last night given its world premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

They're marketing it as a mini Prokofiev-Tchaikovsky festival, but there's no getting round the fact that each of the three concerts in the series is bog-standard programming. Not that it really matters when the Philharmonia has hooked Yuri Temirkanov to conduct the big three Tchaikovsky symphonies (4, 5 and 6). With the charismatic Yevgeny Svetlanov dead some years now, and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky rarely on the scene these days, Temirkanov is the last of the older-generation Russian master conductors currently to be seen in the UK. And, yes, no one except perhaps his one-time protégé Valery Gergiev among the next generation has such authority in inspiring the players to feats of full-blooded Tchaikovskyan suppleness.

It takes quite something to be able to hold the attention of a packed Royal Festival Hall with nothing but an acoustic guitar, a piano, and a bunch of songs.

So anyway, when I told my three teenagers that I was off to see Randy Newman, there was a collective yawn and a mild snort of derision, which (and I think I know them well enough to interpret their snorts of derision) said, in effect, “Well, he’s just some crumbly guy who writes sweet songs for Toy Story.