I have heard countless speeches advocating the importance of arts education, and making bold cross-curricular claims – from England’s cultural ministers and arts leaders, to the Arts Council and the Creative Industries Federation – but I have never heard the case put more persuasively and simply than by Ronnie Cheng, the softly-spoken headmaster of the Diocesan Boys School in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

I have always felt very lucky to have been working as an artist in London during the period when it transformed into the capital of the art world. It has been a beautiful, fascinating and profitable ride. When I started art school in 1978, contemporary art in Britain seemed like a cottage industry situated in some little backwater seldom visited by the public or the media.

Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.

Leif Ove Andsnes directing two great Mozart piano concertos from the keyboard may be the chief attraction when the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra comes to London's Cadogan Hall on Friday to celebrate its 40^th birthday. It was certainly the bait which lured me to Oslo last week. But in talking to the Renaissance man who has led the ensemble since its foundation in 1977, Terje Tønnesen, I discovered that what I heard – including a Haydn symphony just as revelatory as the Mozart concertos – was just the tip of the creative iceberg. Londoners will get a greater slice of that individuality when the NCO play Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony and Grieg's Holberg Suite from memory.

I found out more from Tønnesen the morning after the concert. Which in itself was predictably excellent, but brought a surprise of a different kind. Having admired Edvard Munch's The Sun on the box cover of an LP set featuring Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, I'd wondered where it was housed. I had no idea it was the centrepiece, the high altar, as it were, of a mural series in Oslo's main temple of learning, the University Aula where the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra gives the majority of its concerts on home territory.

The sun glints in the distance as you approach through the vestibule (pictured above). Once entering the hall itself between the columns, two more large-scale scenes complement the al fresco idyll, clearly set on the Norwegian coast with its rocks and islets in midsummer: on the left, "History" is celebrated by an old man telling stories to a young boy, while "Alma Mater" on the right has a mother nourishing her children. Further panels celebrate naked youth in the sunshine. Predictably there was uproar among the academic worthies, and the unveiling didn't take place until 1916, seven years after Munch was announced the winner of the university competition to decorate the aula.

These are joyous scenes for Munch, unfairly labelled a miserabilist; at the time of painting them he had just emerged from confinement in a Copenhagen psychiatric clinic, positive and full of life. They couldn't help but inform the more joyous of the scores on last week's second Aula programme, chiefly Mozart's K482 E flat Piano Concerto, and Haydn's Symphony No. 95. The mystery of the most recent work on the programme, Norwegian composer Magnar Åm's 1977 tone-poem Study of a Psalm Melody from Luster, was also in tune with the great outdoors pictured above it.

Andsnes' relationship with the NCO goes back a long way. The ensemble's status as a self-styled "project orchestra" gathering together many of Norway's finest instrumentalists for intensive periods of work and touring has included invitations to serve as guest artistic leader to the likes of Steven Isserlis, Isabelle van Keulen and Anthony Marwood, and of course Andsnes, who over five seasons performed some of the greatest Mozart concertos, followed by the five Beethovens in the warm surroundings of the Norwegian National Opera, interpretations we know well from his visit to the Proms with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

Now he's added two more to the Mozart list. As he told me over tea before the concert (rehearsal pictured above), “This is a completely different story for me. The D minor [K466] was the first concerto I played with a professional orchestra, in Stavanger when I was 14, and it's always been part of my life, so now it’s like coming back to an old friend. Whereas the E flat is completely new to me, I played it for the first time two weeks ago, and I'm so in love with it.” We talk about the extraordinary finale, its lively rondo coming to a halt to accommodate a heaven-sent, woodwind-led slow serenade of a minuet. “It's so operatic and so like a farewell towards the end. It must have been his own 'Jeunehomme' Concerto [No. 9], the earliest of the three E flat concertos, which inspired the pattern of that grand finale.”

I wondered whether intense study of the Beethoven concertos had changed anything. “It’s difficult to say. Of course the D minor is quite Beethovenian, the one he admired the most, and loved very much. And I’m playing Beethoven’s cadenza in the first movement, Hummel’s in the finale. What I felt during those years with Beethoven was how important it is to express things really clearly, because the intention is so clear all the time, and of course in Mozart there is more ambiguity. In the first movement of the E flat concerto, for instance, when I started to study it, I realised it’s not clear what is foreground and what is background [he sings a legato line for the winds, and another for the violins] – it's just a web. It's very fascinating, you can choose what to emphasise, but both are actually equally important, and that's what is so great, that you have these voices. But it's still important to be understood, so maybe I bring with me some of that. Whether that has to do with Beethoven or whether I'm becoming more confident with this music as a whole, I don't know.”

As both musician and as human being, Andsnes never does flash, never comes out with an insincere word. His pianism flowed out of the orchestral playing he conducted and back again, with that legendary evenness in fast runs, only dominating in the cadenzas. I'm not sure that the one in the first movement of the E flat major was entirely organic within itself – Andsnes hadn’t found a cadenza that suited him, and went along with the work of his EMI producer John Fraser, of which he’s very fond – but Beethoven's for the D minor was magnificent on its own terms. And in any case the orchestral playing, especially in the finale, was meatier, more Beethoven-like than you'd expect from a chamber orchestra playing Mozart. With, of course, wonderful work from the woodwind – exceptionally so from first oboist, Mizuho Yoshii, who somehow managed to make us forget that there weren't clarinets, the real stars of the concertos featuring them, in the D minor work.

Never underestimate the difficulties and rewards of Haydn. Tønnesen told me the morning after how taken aback he'd been by the demands of Symphony No. 95, as quirky a work as any of its late counterparts – the subtle tempo changes, the pick-ups after dramatic pauses (which allowed the sound to resonate in the Aula acoustics: the orchestra's CEO, Per Erik Kise Larsen, thinks they're a little harder since the Munchs were remounted with boards behind them, but it's still a near-ideal venue for a chamber orchestra). At any rate, all the maneouvres were achieved with a decisiveness and a personality I learnt more about from Tønnesen in the NCO's new office space, part of a splendidly converted 19th century bank with Venetian affectations on the outside. The conversion, which houses many key arts organisations based in Oslo, has handsome rehearsal spaces, several rooms good enough to allow for chamber music and a ground-floor hall where the NCO can hold concerts more relaxed than in the teetotal Aula; there's a bar at the back.

Tønnesen (pictured above) is clearly a questing soul. His first ambition was to be an artist; married to an actor, Hilde Grythe, he composes incidental music for plays and has also enlisted dramatic help in trying to get the players to break down what he calls “the fourth wall” between them and the audience. Dramatic readings, most recently from Tolstoy’s harrowing novella The Kreutzer Sonata to inform Tonnesen’s string transcription of the Janáček quartet based on the story of jealousy and murder, enhance the experience (a new CD set of both Janáček quartets and selections from the Tolstoy, in both Norwegian and English, has just been released).

It’s all about communication. As concert-master of the Oslo Philharmonic, Tønnesen found himself frustrated by the low level of understanding which results from “three rehearsals and a performance”. That led to a crisis, not long after he’d founded the NCO, in which he seriously thought about giving up as a musician, only to be saved by a Swedish film, The Brothers Mozart, which spelled out to him the essence of creativity. There have been some ground-breaking projects with the NCO, chiefly “The Gates of Hell”, for which the players studied yoga and drama to emulate Rodin’s figures in the first half of the evening, the audience encouraged to walk around and study them, and played Strauss’s Metamorphosen in the second – from memory. If you can memorise that, and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, you can memorise anything.

Score-less performance is catching on over here: the Aurora Orchestra and Nicholas Collon have done it several times, with the greatest success at the Proms. It's not a gimmick, like colourful dress, cool lighting or letting the audience bring in drinks to encourage the young. Being able to communicate the inner meaning of the music both to your fellow-players and the audience is liberating. I witnessed the vivacious leadership of each of the string sections in the Oslo concert; but there, the score still ruled. In London, you get a chance in the Prokofiev and the Grieg to see what the memorisation principle means in practice. Don’t miss it.

• The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Leif Ove Andsnes in concert at the Cadogan Hall on Friday 17 March
• Leeds Town Hall appearance on Saturday 18 March
• Mozart is the focus of Andsnes' second Rosendal Chamber Music Festival this summer
• More classical reviews on theartsdesk

Next page: the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra perform the Rigaudon from Grieg's Holberg Suite and Strauss's Metamorphosen without scores

At the end of last year’s third series of Line of Duty, we saw the back of the reprehensible Dot “The Caddy” Cottan, and with the much-abused Keeley Hawes consigned to the show’s morgue of deceased leading characters it felt as though important matters had come to a close. I was dubious about LoD when it began in 2012, but what has gradually become apparent is that its mastermind Jed Mercurio (pictured below) has been playing a long, labyrinthine game.

The monster has come alive and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Thirteen actors playing three generations of a very explosive family arrive in full period costume. Towering Dexion shelving units, heaving with foam and cushions and fabrics and off-cuts, reach to the rafters and snake around the entirety of the stage. They form the looming, metallic skeleton of a hugely intricate replica of a three-storey rubber emporium in 1968. The lights, the music, the mingling polyphony of street life, traffic and heavy machinery, flood the theatre. The Kraken has awoken and there’s no way back.

I’m sitting in a rehearsal room in Manchester preparing an Actors Touring Company’s new version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women, listening to a group of young women raise their voices in praise of “untameable Artemis”. She’s the goddess of virginity among many other things. In this play she’s pitted against Aphrodite, the goddess of union, love and sex. The competing claims are complex: retaining one’s virginity implies choice, control, autonomy.

If only the recent American election had been similarly rectified. That was surely the thought on many people’s lips as the 89th Academy Awards ended in confusion with the news that the evening’s expected winner, La La Land, had in fact lost to Moonlight – an upset immediately amplified by easily the biggest cock-up in Oscar history. 

Bruckner conductors improve with age: Haitink, Blomstedt, Gielen – octogenarians all. But Stanisław Skrowaczewski went further, conducting his favourite composer almost to his death, this week at the age of 93. And more than any of his contemporaries, he seemed to embody the Brucknerian qualities of wisdom, experience and patience. A glorious Indian summer brought his work to a new generation, as, apparently oblivious to physical frailty, he toured extensively, in his last years appearing with the world’s top orchestras.

Skrowaczewski was born in Lwów, then in Poland, now Ukraine, in 1923. A musical polymath, he took a long route to the podium, starting out as a pianist and, when a wartime hand injury forced a change of direction, turning to composition. In the late 1940s, he established a reputation in Poland as a conductor through his work with the Katowice Philharmonic, the Krakow Philharmonic and the Warsaw National Orchestra. His international career took off in America, first through an invitation from George Szell to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra and later, in 1960, with his appointment as Music Director of the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra). That relationship was long and fruitful, with Skrowaczewski retaining a position with the orchestra (from 1979 as conductor laureate) right up to his death, an astonishing 56 years. And when, in 2012, the Minnesota players became involved in a bitter management dispute, leading to a 16-month lock-out, they found a high-profile champion in Stan, as he was affectionately known in the Twin Cities. Skrowaczewski led an unofficial concert during the dispute, and also the first concert back under official management when it was settled.

After standing down the main Music Director position in Minneapolis, Skrowaczewski took over the Hallé Orchestra for a decade from 1982, and he is still fondly remembered in Manchester. Composition occupied an increasing amount of his time from the mid-90s, although from 2007 to 2010 he was Principal Conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, and in the last years of his life toured extensively, continuing to perform with the Minnesota Orchestra and many other American orchestras, as well as making regular appearances in Europe, including regular returns to Poland, the country now taking huge pride in its long absent son.

So what makes Skrowaczewski’s Bruckner special? At the most basic level, it all works, and with a rigorous but intuitive inner logic. Skrowaczewski knew how to deal with the awkward joins and unconvincing transitions in the early symphonies, finding the straightforward answers that eluded Bruckner himself in his many revisions. He had an ability to bring out the grandeur of Bruckner’s writing, but without excess. There is no grandstanding here, no bombast. Climaxes would often be presented in swift tempos, and with carefully shaped and separated phrases, the results innately musical and deeply felt, but never overly controlled or restrained. Skrowaczewski also found subtext in Bruckner’s music, where others present it at face value. His last UK appearance was with the London Philharmonic in October last year, in a performance of the Fifth Symphony. The blurb on the back of the inevitable own-label release (LPO-0090) described the finale as "an interpretation of humility," and so it was. Skrowaczewski seemed awed by Bruckner’s chorale ending, but also shaded it with a very human sense of scale and proportion – the divine, yes, but expressed through humble means. Skrowaczewski leaves us a complete Bruckner symphonies cycle with the Saarbrücken Radio Orchestra recorded 1991-2001 (reissued in 2015 as OEHMS 25), a Ninth with Minnesota and, with the London Philharmonic, Symphonies Three, Five and Seven – the LPO Third Symphony (LPO 84) the finest of these.

Not that Skrowaczewski was solely a Bruckner specialist; his currently-available discography runs to 22 composers. His recordings with the Saarbrücken orchestra include a Beethoven symphony cycle (OEHMS 526), a real slow burner. The recordings received little attention when they were first released, in 2005-07, but they have a habit of turning up on desert-island lists and critics’ top choices. As in his Bruckner, Skrowaczewski applies a lightness of touch to Beethoven, but also a sense of unshakable inner logic. The Fourth is a gem.

He was also a passionate advocate of modern music. One of Skrowaczewski’s earliest accolades was conducting the first Paris performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, in 1948 when it was new music. In Poland, Skrowaczewski had been a close friend of Lutosławski, whose music he championed throughout his life, culminating in an impressive live recording of the First Symphony and Concerto for Orchestra in 2014 with the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra (Accord 196-2). Skrowaczewski never lost his curiosity for new and adventurous repertoire: What may have been his final appearance in Poland, a concert at the new hall in Katowice last November, opened with Schnittke’s seldom-performed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (the early one, 1960), with long-time collaborator Ewa Kupiec.

In the long term we may remember him more as a composer. Such were the fates of Berlioz and Mahler, both better-known in their lifetimes as conductors of other composer’s work. Skrowaczewski the composer is very similar in spirit to Skrowaczewski the conductor, addressing weighty matters, but with lightness of touch and economy of means. His style is somewhere between Lutosławski and Bruckner. Try his Concerto for Orchestra, a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize; the surface textures are energetic and modern, while the underlying structure and spiritual breadth are pure Bruckner: The final movement is entitled "Anton Bruckners Himmelfahrt" ("Anton Brucker's Journey to Heaven"). Most of Skrowaczewski’s major compositions were recorded for the Reference and Albany labels, with the composer himself leading the Minnesota and Saarbrücken orchestras, definitive accounts that will surely be his lasting legacy.

• Read more classical music reviews on theartsdesk

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Next page: an in-depth 2012 interview with Skrowaczewski