Elgar declared a “massive hope in the future” as the human programme behind his epic First Symphony’s final exultant sprint. That hope was sprinkled like gold dust around the featured artists of this all-English concert. There are good reasons to be optimistic about the effective, colourful scores of 32-year-old Anna Clyne; we know that Benjamin Grosvenor, her junior by 12 years, is already a pianist of mercurial assurance, a real front-runner.

Welcome to the marble halls of Mr Selfridge. All the world, in ITV’s new costumer (in every sense), isn’t a stage - it’s a shop. And bestriding his eponymous Oxford Street emporium, which we saw in this first episode in the run-up to its 1909 grand opening, like a colossus is Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American who came from his native Chicago to open the world’s finest department store of its time.

David Byrne's new book How Music Works has once again brought to the fore the ever thorny debate about the relationship between technology and music. The dance between the two is being conducted at an ever more frenetic pace, and seems likely to continue to do so throughout 2013.  

Valery Gergiev’s exploration of the music of Karol Szymanowski is one of the most vitalising series mounted at the Barbican in recent years - to compare, say, with Sir Colin Davis’s Sibelius and Berlioz, Michael Tilson Thomas’s tributes to Leonard Bernstein, or Gergiev’s own Shostakovich and (increasingly) Prokofiev.

Valery Gergiev is a human dynamo.

“You don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” It’s a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detritus of autobiography and memoir. In Alan Bennett’s 2001 Hymn and his latest short-play Cocktail Sticks the author sets out in search of himself once more, finding on his quest not only his own history but that of a generation and an age at an ever-increasing remove from our own. It could be cosy, it could easily be glib, but for the most part it’s just funny, and terribly, terribly poignant.

Is scatophilia on the loose at the BBC? After The Secret Life of Rubbish, billed as "a view of the history of modern Britain - from the back end where the rubbish comes out", creatively programmed with a repeat of The Toilet: An Unspoken History on the same night, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Both reach, so to speak, the parts that most other television documentaries don’t.

Speaking about the Requiem he composed in 1990 in memory of the London Sinfonietta’s long-time artistic director Michael Vyner, Hans Werner Henze always talked as a believing atheist. “Paradise is here or ought to be,” he insisted, “not later, when nothing else happens;” and “In this world there is no hereafter, only presence: you can meet angels and devils in the street at any time.”

It's sad, isn't it, that we still live in a world where the more something sounds like a great party, the less “serious” it is considered? Think about how much deep meaning is attached by how many to, say, the portentous mitherings of Thom Yorke, then try to imagine that degree of beard-rubbing analysis being given over to this non-stop blast of joyous grooves that have rocked festival stages, dance clubs and hip hop shows over the summer. Not gonna happen, is it?

John Bunyan’s Christian, hero of The Pilgrim’s Progress, may have been putting his feet up in the Celestial City for the better part of 350 years, but for Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim it has been a rather different story. Languishing in the Slough of Despond after an unsuccessful first run at the Royal Opera in the 1950s, the composer’s lavish “Morality” The Pilgrim’s Progress, with its patchwork biblical libretto, vast forces and uniquely blended combination of opera and oratorio, has never since established a secure place in the repertoire.