'Outstanding' dystopian tale wins debut writer the children's prize in Costa book awards

They are in athletic mood at the Proms and in opera, but you might need your thermals...

When the fiery chariot finally arrived to transport Elijah aloft and the antiphonal trumpets and drums and assorted ophicleides of Paul McCreesh’s mightily augmented Gabrieli Players Consort and Players were rent asunder by the open-stopped thrust of the Royal Albert Hall organ you suddenly realised why the Victorians became damp with ecstasy at the very mention of the prophet’s name.

It’s not only the narrative tension that turns on interlocking screws in Glyndebourne’s production of Britten’s claustrophobic masterpiece.

An episode of cannibalistic sex is in one way tonight's gruesome climax – Béatrice Dalle chomping on an unfortunate lover – with Tindersticks carrying on in their usual hangdog manner. You realise then how intimate their relationship with the French film director Claire Denis is. They find the gore completely natural.

Long overshadowed by Dido and Aeneas, John Blow's Venus and Adonis beguiles in this witty, sensual performance under lutenist Elizabeth Kenny.

Elgar’s The Kingdom arrives in the heat of inspiration on a surge of orchestral magnificence. A glorious theme representing “New Faith” is announced in the strings, as noble and aspirational as anything Elgar wrote.

The guru-principle holds good in Western classical music as it does in the music of the East. Kotaro Fukuma’s programme-note suggests he’s collected a whole gallery of gurus: if he’s drawn the key element from each, he should have crossed Leon Fleischer’s Teutonic power with Aldo Ciccolini’s Italian finesse, and Richard Goode’s serene classicism with Maria Joao Pires’s bold Romanticism; Mitsuko Uchida’s fastidious intensity with Leslie Howard’s virtuosity.

It was Stephen Kovacevich’s 70th birthday party and his highly individual guests represented past, present, and future.

Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘Hansel und Gretel’ has had to wait 120 years for its first Proms staging, but its rapturous reception brings the wheel of its popularity full circle.

A teeming, perspiring crowd and a first prize of nearly £100,000 for one of the most frantically contested handicaps of the year will together make the Knavesmire no place for faint hearts this afternoon. What a test of nerve, then, awaits Martin Lane when hoisted into the saddle on Wigmore Hall before the John Smith's Cup.

Those who missed the Classical Opera Company's Gluck retrospective in January can stop fretting.