When An Inconvenient Truth won the best documentary Oscar 10 years ago, the film’s success marked two significant events: a positive turning point in the campaign to avert environmental catastrophe; and the resurrection of the public career of Al Gore, after his presidential defeat at the ha

The blossoming of modern classical into a serious commercial contender has been an unexpected recent development. Then again, it should come as no surprise that in a world raddled by stuff to hear and look at 24/7, people are turning to music that offers contemplative peace and quiet, that’s all about eyes-closed, non-verbal beauty. For it is the floaty, gentle, soothing styles that are taking off, not a resurgence in Wagnerian opera. The likes of Ludovico Einardi, Max Richter, Joep Beving, Nils Frahm and Jóhann Jóhannsson, often with connections to cinema, are offering rich, mostly keyboard-led sounds, carefully, unobtrusively painted with 21^st-century electronic technology.

James Heather’s debut album quietly announces him as a new contender in this world, a possible future heavyweight. It’s a simple affair, just him and a piano, but like Erik Satie and Georges Auric a century ago, it doesn’t stop him using the instrument as a conduit through which to express a range of clearly felt moods. In fact, he’s more like the former than the latter, who had an inclination towards rumbustious discordance. Instead, Heather’s nine pieces have a warm approachability, riven with understated emotion. With one exception, they’re inspired by a range of global news stories connected to specific events, ranging from the Boer War to the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

They range from the catchy “Empire Sounds”, which is weighted with thoughtful poignancy, such that it induces in the listener a sense of just finishing a powerful film or boxset. “Teardrop Tattoo”, on the other hand, has a bubbling happiness, the rush of a first date gone well. It’s an album that runs the gamut, from the slow forlorn emptiness of “MHope” to the grander, more old-fashioned stylings of “Pathos” (the one piece not based on a news story).

After a few listens, the striking thing about Stories From Far Away on Piano is that it may have been conceptually sculpted out of material from around the world, but, with contradictory simplicity, it emanates a nearness to the concerns of the human heart.

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Overleaf: Listen to James Heather "Last Minute Change of Heart"

"Everyone suddenly burst out singing"’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his paean to humanity amidst the horror of war, "Everyone Sang". And sing they did, all 180 of them, crammed onto Garsington’s modest stage for its new community opera Silver Birch by Roxanna Panufnik to a libretto by Jessica Duchen. Here were primary school children, teenagers, professional singers, members of a women’s refuge, ex-military personnel, and a waggy-tailed dog. Even Sassoon’s own great-nephew lent voice to a chorus of roof-raising passion and purpose.

Oh those Victorians!  Hail Prince Albert whose far-sighted ambition led to Albertopolis, embracing museums, galleries, universities and the Royal Albert Hall.

At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography. This year the show is said to be the subject of a "rigorous curatorial process" designed to show rare historical treasures, new work by established masters, and work by the brightest new stars.

Contemporary music from Mali hovers delicately (and creatively) between purist tradition and more or less successful attempts at making things more attractive to a younger and worldwide audience.

If Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain was a work of political protest when it premiered in 2000, in 2017 it’s a piece that reads more like a commentary – a disturbing musical documentary that captures nearly 20 years of escalating European tensions, suspicions and right-wing extremism. As harmonic consensus gave way last night to chattering confusion, musical certainty to a distorted multiplicity of possibilities, abstraction has rarely felt more pointed, more horribly specific.

John Adams, greatest communicator among living front-rank composers, zoomed into the follow-spot for the second and third concerts of the New York Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency.

In American mythology, the frontier offered a clean slate, the opportunity to escape from the shadow of the past and live heroically. But, as with everything else in the context of the American Dream, which continues to unfold in real life as if it were but a simulacrum of myth, the present is haunted by the shadow of evil: greed, violence – between white men, but also against native Americans – and personal tragedy. We are prisoners of our past, and nothing can save us.

Gather round the fire, friends: no Santa down the chimney this Christmas Eve, but the curiously comforting Alan Bennett, with his sardonic and occasionally optimistic diaries. The latest published instalment has the slightly wry title Keeping On Keeping On; Bennett tells us the original title was to be Banging On Banging On.