Huw Watkins’ Concerto for Orchestra, the fourth new work of his to be commissioned and premiered by the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder, is another beautifully crafted and highly appealing construction.

It’s also intriguing in its game-playing with genre, in almost a mirror image of the way his First Symphony was back in 2017. That, a two-movement piece, was undoubtedly symphonic by the time it reached its somewhat surprising ending, but managed to give the impression of being a concerto for orchestra at many points along the way.

There was a change of conductor from the one advertised for this BBC Philharmonic performance at the Bridgewater Hall – but the one who we heard from was an interpreter of extraordinary vision and intensity. Yoel Gamzou is also a composer in his own right, and a Mahler specialist, it would seem: he’s made his own completion of the Tenth Symphony, so he’s no doubt as aware of the language and creative imagination of that other composer-conductor as anyone.

It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped away at gunpoint, And… make it into a musical? 

Kahchun Wong returned to the symphony with which he made his first big impression conducting the Hallé – and made a big impression with it again.

It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this, Britten’s avowedly pacifist opera, Orpha Phelan – whose version of his Billy Budd for Opera North nearly 10 years ago contained one of the most thrilling battle scenes ever staged.

In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised film language – cult movies indeed.

A cello concerto received its UK premiere in Manchester last night – almost 100 years after it was written. It’s by Maria Herz, a German-Jewish composer who had to leave her native land in the 1930s and whose work has remained almost unknown until quite recently.

Raphaela Gromes has championed this concerto, giving its German premiere last year, and she brought it to Britain with the Hallé and Alpesh Chauhan (main picture).

The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.

As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.

This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float?