Concerts need to have themes, it seems, today, and the BBC Philharmonic’s publicity suggested two contrasting ideas for the opening of its 2025-26 season at the Bridgewater Hall. One was “Fountain of Youth” (the programme title and also that of Julia Wolfe’s nine-minute work that began its orchestral content) and the other “Grasping pain, embracing fate” (used as a kind of strapline).

Kabalevsky: Cello Concerto No. 2, Schumann: Cello Concerto Theodor Lyngstad (cello), Copenhagen Phil/Eva Ollikainen (OUR Recordings)

My colleague Boyd Tonkin visited the Lammermuir Festival for the first time this year. His eyes and ears have been opened to its treasures, but some of us have been in on the secret for years. Importantly, that includes the East Lothian audiences, who have been attending the festival in bigger numbers than ever, ensuring that the festival has sold out almost every concert in its biggest venue, St Mary’s Church, Haddington, and packed out many other smaller ones, too. 

If you were a devotee of Dmitri Shostakovich whose only opportunity to attend some live performances marking this year’s 50th anniversary of his death was spending the weekend of 21 - 25 August at the Presteigne Festival, you probably wouldn’t have felt short-changed.

Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Ravel: La Valse Orchestre de Paris/Klaus Mäkelä (Decca)

“Powerful, Timeless, Inspiring” it says on the front cover of the programme-book for this year’s supposedly 297th Three Choirs Festival at Hereford. So please leave your frivolity at the cathedral door with your gun and your mobile phone.

Guitarist Louis Campbell and fiddle player Owen Spafford started playing together as teenagers in the National Youth Folk Ensemble when Sam Sweeney (of Bellowhead and Leveret) was its director. They released their first album, You Golden, three years ago. It featured audacious musical extrapolations from Playford’s English Dance Master – also a key source for Sweeney’s Leveret – and with an emphasis on ensuring an abundance space, rather than notes, in the playing.