The word 'accompanist' comes loaded with prejudice: the singer is the thing, with the shadowy figure at the keyboard merely expected to play the notes. Yes, of course it’s nonsense, but until Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau publicly proclaimed the brilliance of the great Gerald Moore, this was the prevalent view.

In Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell's collaboration with Michel van der Aa we neither know nor care what is going on - it is a work of remarkable arrogance

A perpetual voyager is saved by selflessness and a terrific chorus

Early woodwind virtuoso François Lazarevitch, Les Musiciens and the earthy-toned singers Simone Sorini, Enea Sorini and Marc Busnel take us back to the time when street parties lasted a week or more.

The Vienna Philharmonic’s contribution to the Rest Is Noise festival would have been significant whatever they played, but when their conductor Michael Tilson Thomas mounted the podium, it was to apologise for the fact that they would be making very little noise at all.

Getting into Buckingham Palace might have been easier than getting through the well-guarded door of this former Smithfield slaughter-house now converted into a nightclub: Universal and Bang&Olufsen had temporarily taken it over for some gentle reciprocal promotion.

Ethnomusicologists are like bees, with melodies being the pollen they transfer from culture to culture. In the 1950s the great American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax went on a song-collecting trip to Italy, and brought back recordings of a wealth of music which is now mostly extinct.

In a leaden park-and-bark reading of a Verdian tale of love and loss, the set has more dramatic range than the principals

Of the generation of Czech composers who perished in the death camps, Erwin Schulhoff is the most enigmatic.

One lesson to be drawn from Keith Jarrett’s recent Southbank recital was how porous the border now is between jazz piano and its classical counterpart.

Born in Russia, but rigorously trained in Germany from early childhood: a surprisingly large number of piano stars have emerged via this route, with 26-year-old Igor Levit prominent among them.

In the Easter splurge of Bach, John Eliot Gardiner’s ‘marathon’ was always going to stand out, and it marked the culmination of a lifelong crusade.

Few composers can inject as much significance into thirty seconds of music as Gyorgy Kurtag, and few writers have equalled the aphoristic terseness of Franz Kafka, so Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments represents a marriage made, if not in heaven, certainly in a grimly harmonious version of hell.

Topical references in programme notes printed in advance are risky, and Boris Berezovsky’s miserable demise has made Covent Garden’s essayist - for whom he represents the quintessential pampered exile - look silly.

Add magnesium to strontium, and prepare yourself for fireworks