There’s nothing like practising what you preach. “I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish, and indeed a deliberate conning of the public” said the composer Ruth Gipps to her biographer Jill Halstead.

Charles Hazlewood (b. 1966) has worked across the gamut of orchestral music, his career showcasing the multitude of ways it can be perceived and enjoyed.

To celebrate the 60th birthday of Sir James MacMillan, the Edinburgh International Festival has programmed his music over five concerts, including the Nash Ensemble with Fourteen Little Pictures, the National Youth Choir of Scotland with All the Hills and Vales Along, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Festival Chorus with the cantata Quickening.

There is a video, part of Greenpeace’s laudable Save The Arctic Campaign, in which Ludovico Einaudi sits at a Steinway atop a small ice flow performing his Elegy for the Arctic. As he plays a descending scale, the camera pans slightly to the right just in time to see a chunk of glacier break away and crash into the sea. Perfect timing!

A robe can be many things. Sure, it’s a garment, but it can also be cover, a disguise, a costume or a uniform. It’s also something composed of many different threads woven together to create something much bigger. It’s these kinds of layers of multiplicity which form the basis of the inspiration for Scottish composer Alastair White’s new opera, ROBE, premiering at this year’s Tête à Tête opera festival. Scored only for piano, flute and four female voices, the opera creates a layered matrix of worlds within worlds, exploring complex networks between stories, history and experiences.

Brahms: The Piano Quartets The Primrose Piano Quartet (Meridian)

Stewart Goodyear: Callaloo, Piano Sonata; Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue Stewart Goodyear (piano), Chineke! Orchestra/Wayne Marshall (Orchid Classics)

Who would have thought that a one-narrator show, mainly about projects that never got off the ground, would turn out to be such a satisfying evening’s entertainment?

Two hundred years ago next month, an assembly of around 60,000 people gathered on St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to protest about their lack of political representation. Speakers addressed the crowd, bands played and banners were carried.

The Orchestral Music of Jonathan Dove BBC Philharmonic/Timothy Redmond, with Lawrence Zazzo (counter-tenor) (Orchid Classics)