Capsule is the Birmingham outfit that is good enough to bring the avant-garde, the lairy and the down-right odd to the city every summer for the splendid Supersonic Festival. However, that isn’t the extent of their activities, as there are also Home of Metal events and one-off gigs to keep Midlands’ sonic explorers happy for the rest of the year.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's latest dynamo of a music director and communication incarnate, doesn't believe in taking it easy.

Winter came to Birmingham this weekend but fortunately, so did a modern-day, multi-national Viking band of rockers, consisting of Corrosion Of Conformity and Orange Goblin, ably assisted by Fireball Ministry and Black Moth. With no intention of moping about, in the words of Orange Goblin lead singer Ben Ward, they came to “get drunk and get wild”, and that is exactly what happened.

There’s always a special atmosphere when the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra returns to Birmingham Town Hall, and it’s not just because of the building’s Greek Revival beauty: the gilded sunburst on the ceiling, or the towering, intricately painted mass of the organ, topped with its cameo of Queen Victoria.

Imagine an orchestral concert made up exclusively of contemporary works by living composers: a programme in which every note was written within the last two decades. Imagine not only that this concert is sufficiently popular to fill a 2,000-seat hall with a noticeably youthful and diverse crowd, but that its format is already being replicated regularly by pretty much every major UK symphony orchestra. Now ask yourself how much critical attention such a concert would receive? You wouldn’t be able to pick up the Sunday review supplements for sheer weight of coverage, would you?

Those of us schooled in the English choral tradition know and love Hubert Parry's "My soul, there is a country", but few have sung or heard it live as the first of a mighty cycle. Parry completed the six Songs of Farewell not long before his death 100 years ago.

This should have been the third much-anticipated Prom of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's inspiring communicator-in-chief Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. She's now on maternity leave. So those of us who hadn't experienced Ludovic Morlot live before had a chance to witness what a splendid moulder and shaper he is, here in a skilfully co-ordinated all-French programme.

Birmingham outfit Pram achieved profile amongst alt-music connoisseurs shortly after the millennium. They’d been going for over a decade but their weird-masked presentation and spooked, abject music suddenly struck a chord.

How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she probably wouldn’t see 30, and directed her energies accordingly.

This Echo and the Bunnymen gig in Birmingham is one that almost didn’t happen, on a tour to promote the soon-to-be-released The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon, their first album since 2014’s Meteorites.