With its themes of racism, violence, oppression and climate change, Marvin Gaye's 1971 album, What's Going On, is as pertinent today as it was when it was released 50 years ago. Presented by Tomorrow’s Warriors, Nu Civilisation Orchestra played this seminal body of work with all the soul and spirit the record merits, in a performance that was both inherently faithful to the album, but still unique.

"Nature is healing," declared the social media meme, back in the early days of lockdown when humanity had temporarily retreated to focus on its banana bread. There were pictures to prove it, apparently. Dolphins sported in the canals of Venice; city gardens filled with newly emboldened songbirds. Didn’t a herd of goats colonise Llandudno at one point? Something like that, anyway.

Having been founded only in 2017 by singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada, Black Pumas have been rapidly rising to fame, with a Grammy award nomination in 2020 and the majority of their current European tour dates sold out.

Kicking off a brand new partnership between the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Hockley Social Club, this first ever Symphonic Session saw a string quartet from the CBSO take centre stage at Birmingham’s latest street-food venue, Hockley Social Club, on Thursday evening. Hockley Social Club is the new, permanent Brum-based home for street-food stalwarts Digbeth Dining Club.

With a few extra dates to her rescheduled UK tour, Scottish folk legend Karine Polwart returned to Birmingham Town Hall with some tunes from her latest album – Still as You’re Sleeping, an album of just voice and piano recording with jazz pianist Dave Milligan – plus a mix of earlier material, covers and traditional songs given her own signature twist. On stage with Polwart for this tour is her brother, guitarist Steven Polwart, and her neighbour and friend, multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson.

Is there any composer alive who writes more luminously bittersweet elegies than Mark-Anthony Turnage? Taking key lines from memorialising poets through the ages as inspiration, he knows that instrumental phrases must sing, sometimes to invisible words, as well as dance if they’re to pierce the heart.

Incredibly it’s now 40 years since the release of Duran Duran’s debut album. To mark this event, the remaining members of the band’s classic line-up decided to return to Birmingham. Not to the NIA or any similar-sized venue, but for a couple of intimate gigs at the city’s O2 Institute.

Five weeks have passed since the death of opera director Graham Vick from complications due to Covid-19, shocking even to those of us (un)prepared for the worst, and yet so many of us think about him every day.

Nominally, this was a programme of three symphonies. The first, though, sounded like music re-cut and pasted from a very British film and the second was a suite, albeit impressively reworked, from an opera.

The love of power corrupts, the power of love falters or fails.