What better work for Harry Bicket and The English Concert to perform at the Proms than Bach's joyous Mass in B Minor. Joyous firstly because of the music itself, with its vast stylistic and emotional range. Joyous secondly because, despite the intense scholarship to which Bach and his music have been subjected over the years, its genesis remains unusually shrouded in mystery for such a major work.

Mozart: The Four Horn Concertos Marc Geujon, Orchestre Paul Kuentz/Paul Kuentz (Calliope)

It’s cold, grey and damp. Welcome to Leeds. The city centre has grown more homogenous, less distinctive since I arrived here in the 1980s, but there are still delights to be found.

Bruckner: Symphony No 9 (with Finale completed by Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca) Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle(EMI)

Brigham Young University in Utah is the largest private university in America, and is probably best known for its affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, AKA the Mormons. What’s less commonly known is that the university also has a choir (four different choirs, in fact) that is among the finest collegiate ensembles in the US.

How incredibly heartening that this latest edition of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Total Immersion, focusing on the music of the contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, sold out days in advance. Including an introduction to Pärt's music by the BBC Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Dorian Supin's documentary film about the composer, 24 Preludes for a Fugue, a freestage event by the BBC SO Family Orchestra performing a new work inspired by Pärt's music, and three concerts, Saturday's day-long exploration provided an embarrassment of riches.

It's one of the great perversities of modern cultural life that orchestras from America and Venezuela visit London more often than those from Birmingham or Manchester. A perversity and a shame, as last night's exceptional performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and CBSO Chorus on a rare visit to the Barbican showed.

Like a streamlined sandstone-coloured satellite berthed unexpectedly in Manchester’s medieval quarter, the new addition to the country’s largest specialist music school, Chetham’s (pronounced Cheetham’s), makes a confident statement for the future. It looms seven storeys high amidst atmospheric buildings dating back as far as 600 years. 

Fancy buying a new recording of Bach’s Cantatas? It’ll cost only slightly more than a regular CD. The only snag is it hasn’t been recorded yet, which is where you come in.

It's the effortlessness that does it. So many singer-songwriters strain like billy-oh to make obvious their artistry, their auteurship, their emotional authenticity, when behind it all they're doing something really quite ordinary. This album, on the other hand, veritably glides out of the speakers, full of light, air, easy wit and endless hooks so perfectly and simply realised you'd swear you'd been whistling them to yourself half your life – yet the emotional weight and musical depths hidden behind its inviting surfaces are devastating.