The fascination of the East has been a constant in classical music’s history, from the jangling sounds of the Janissary bands to Mozart’s Seraglio, Sheherazade’s dreamy tales to Britten’s seductive gamelan. Last night’s Prom gave the East a chance to answer back, setting Nishat Khan’s new Sitar Concerto in dialogue with Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony – a musical portrait of a landscape rather closer to home.

It’s not a crowd-pleaser like Albert Herring, nor wittily fanciful like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or macabre like The Turn of the Screw and certainly not the classic that Peter Grimes has become, and until three years ago Glyndebourne had never even staged Britten’s Billy Budd. But Michael Grandage’s 2010 production was a sea-changer. Aided by Mark Elder in the pit, the director made his operatic debut with devastating simplicity, reminding us all of the power of this uneasy tragedy.

You wait years for a live performance to test whether Tippett’s Second Symphony is a masterpiece, and then two come along within six months. Both are due to the missionary zeal of the BBC Symphony Orchestra management, determined to give an overshadowed English composer a voice in Britten centenary year. But while Martyn Brabbins convinced me totally of the Second’s dynamic journey back in April at the Barbican, Oliver Knussen caught its rarefied sounds but not always its progressive sense.

“Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye,” Cézanne once said of the Impressionist painter. Unlike Cézanne, British artist William Blake Richmond, named by his artist father after the elder Richmond’s visionary mentor William Blake, had no truck with Monet’s eye. Nor indeed Cézanne’s or the whole cabal of French avant-gardists. What are the French good for, rails Richmond in Rory Fellowes's A Victorian Eye, except for wine and cheese? Richmond, like all eminent Victorians before him, looks instead to Italy and to the classical ideal.

As good old Catullus put it, I hate and love, you may ask why. No doubt it's my job as a critic to probe such difficult responses to Britten's Canticles. Why am I so repelled by the sickly-sweet lullaby Isaac sings just before daddy's about to put him to the sword in Canticle II, then so haunted by the sombre war requiem of Britten's Edith Sitwell setting, Canticle III? Ambivalence about Ian Bostridge's weird dominating presence and Neil Bartlett's marshalling of five responses to the five very different narratives doesn't make it any easier.

Fusing the intensity of first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series with top-down strategy games doesn't immediately seem a good fit. First-person shooters work because you respond viscerally to bullets flying past your face and the fear of the battlefield as you sprint through mayhem, dodging and weaving. Strategy games, even the realtime modern videogame versions, rely on a cerebral strategising – often sacrificing men as pawns in a broader scheme. Yet fusing these two ideas is exactly what Company of Heroes 2 tries to do and mostly succeeds at.

In Britten’s centenary the Aldeburgh Festival has come up with two mesmerising opera happenings. The innovation is to stage Peter Grimes on the town’s beach, a few hundred yards from the composer’s beachside Aldeburgh first home, amid a splurge of decaying fishing boats. The daring recreation is to present all three of his orchestrally bewitching 1960s Church Parables in their original setting, Orford Church, where Peter Pears famously created three roles: the distraught Madwoman in Curlew River, haughty Nebuchadnezzar in The Burning Fiery Furnace&n

First things first. There are limited tickets still available for this run of Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach but there won’t be for long, so move fast. You can read the rest of this review later; the next few minutes could make the difference between experiencing one of the most memorable performances of your life and just finding out what you’ve missed out on.

My great-grandmother used to say, "In the fall, leaves fall," meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a principal since 1993, retired in the role of her choosing, Kenneth MacMillan’s Mary Vetsera, a crazed, sexed-up nymphet with a death-wish.

What rare luxury. A three-concert series from the London Symphony Orchestra and their Principal Guest Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is lure enough, but add three collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist and you have to rope off a special area in the Barbican for the returns queue. Rarer still – it would be worth every moment of the wait.