Errollyn Wallen is celebrated both as a singer-songwriter and for her rigorous and communicative contemporary new music. Her works include 13 operas and a plethora of orchestral, choral, chamber works, solo and ensemble piano music and concertos, as well as award-winning music for film and TV; her Principia and Spirit in Motion were featured in the London Paralympics opening ceremony in 2012.

"Just listen". That's an imperative, of course, but it can be a very fair and reasonable one if the tone is right. It was Claudio Abbado's encouragement to his Lucerne Festival Orchestra players to make chamber music writ large. It also sounds persuasive and not at all militant coming from the mouths of ENO chorus members as their plea to the dramatic changes proposed by Chief Executive Officer Cressida Pollock, appointed a year ago.

Youth, AKA Martin Glover (b 1960), is a renowned music producer and bassist in the post-punk band Killing Joke. He achieved his first success with the latter in the late Seventies and has often been at the forefront of innovation and development in British music since. Having played a key role in developing their uniquely dubby, dark sound, Youth parted ways with Killing Joke in 1982 and formed Brilliant, a band that espoused an ahead-of-its-time dance musical ethos and included the involvement of both future members of the KLF.

A decade ago I was sent to interview George Martin and his son Giles about Love, the remarkable remix of the Beatles catalogue which they created for Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show in Las Vegas. After the interview proper, in which both talked about collaborating with each other and with Paul, Ringo and the widows of John and George, I asked Sir George Martin if we could talk about an area of particular interest to me.

Carla Marie Williams is a songwriter, artist mentor and founder of writing collective NewCrowd. She has written for stars including Beyoncé, Girls Aloud, Kylie and Rudimental, with a BRIT Award for her contribution to Girls Aloud’s single "The Promise", and Beyoncé’s recent hit "Runnin".

Choreographers are not generally household names, but Matthew Bourne must come close. Not only does his company tour frequently and widely, with a Christmas run at Sadler’s Wells that many families regard as an essential fixture of their seasonal celebrations, his pieces have also been seen on Sky, on the BBC, and on film, most famously when his Swan Lake featured at the end of the 2000 movie Billy Elliot. This month he’s set to become even more widely known, as a film version of his show The Car Man is shown in dozens of UK cinemas.

London has been missing out on Boris Giltburg for too long. He's been playing Shostakovich concertos back to back with Petrenko in Liverpool, and the big Rachmaninov works up in Scotland (see theartsdesk's review today of the latest Royal Scottish National Orchestra programme).

While most set designers come from an art or theatre background, Ric Lipson has parlayed his architectural training into an unusual skillset: designing not just what goes on inside entertainment venues, but the buildings themselves. At his studio Stufish Entertainment Architects, founded by the late Mark Fisher in the mid 1990s, the team provides anything from a mic stand up to creating new and complex edifices.

If there is a successor to the great Hollywood costume designer Edith Head, it is Sandy Powell, the British designer of six films directed by Martin Scorsese, three each by Todd Haynes and Neil Jordan, and others by the likes of Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Stephen Frears and Julie Taymor. Powell’s recent Oscar nominations for designing the costumes for Haynes’s Carol and Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella raised her total to 12: her wins have come for Shakespeare in Love, Scorsese’s The Aviator, and Young Victoria.

Described by Courtney Pine as "the most exciting jazz band to come out of the UK" and hailed in the press as the new young lions, Empirical broke cover in 2007, topping album of the year charts with their self-titled debut and picking up wins at the prestigious EBU/European Jazz Competition and the Peter Whittingham Jazz Award all within a few months.