Wes Anderson kicks off the festival in kooky style... what else did you expect?

The story goes that the Dartington estate near Totnes gathers an atmosphere of unmatchable mysticism from south Devon's ancient spiritual sites and ley lines. So far, so New Age. But at Dartington's famous International Summer School of Music (DISS) the magic seems real: it's impossible not to be caught up in it.

You couldn't see the Lone Ranger for dust - and I doubt we've ever heard the most famous gallop in music despatched with such fleet-footed (or should that be hooved) panache.

Matthew Norman had fun on Monday, speculating that Ed Balls might launch a putsch against Ed Miliband when the Labour leader "goes under the knife" to cure his sleep apnoea.

It may be tempting providence to programme Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony in Manchester at precisely the time that the season of renewal should well and truly have sprung

When asked why his documentary is called Patience (After Sebald), Grant Gee referred to a moment in WG Sebald's Austerlitz in which a man is seen arranging postcards on a table. "It is as if he is playing a game of patience, as if the right arrangement of images were the key to a trauma."

It is slightly frightening seeing a show when you know you are going to take over a role. Actors are like magpies – they pick everything up that they think is clever. Of course, you want to reinvent a role and not repeat what the previous actor did. The fact I have taken over from Richard Griffiths twice – both in The Habit of Art and The History Boys – mystifies me because we are very different.

At the spiritual centre of this exciting re-match between Mark Elder and the London Symphony Orchestra was Benjamin Britten’s intellectual and emotional kinship with Dmitri Shostakovich.

From Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and Debussy's Golliwog's Cakewalk, written for the composer's three-year-old daughter, orchestral pieces have long introduced children to classical music. But the number of pieces written with children in mind is far from numerous. Why hasn't more classical music been written especially for children?