Bath Festival Contemporary Music Weekend

When H L Coleman and Chris Haslam were room-mates at University at Wyoming, it was the American Coleman who steered the young English student through the adjustment to an alien culture. Now they are room- mates again and team-mates with the Birmingham Bullets, but it is the 6ft 11in Haslam who is helping Coleman to find his feet, and shooting touch, in a foreign land.

Hiss and boo the musical purists

Sir: Michael Varcoe-Cocks (letter, 14 August) defends the right of enthusiastic but inexperienced concert-goers to applaud between movements.

I attended the Monkees' concert in Manchester and can understand the reluctance of the organisers to continue to give out press tickets ("Cries and Whispers", Real Life, 23 March). The concert was entertaining, lively, and thoroughly enjoyed by the audience and the Monkees finished to a standing ovation. Two days later a less than lukewarm review appeared in the local paper.

Billed as a multi-media spectacle, this monumental testament of the Jewish experience is actually a thematic, hi-tech concert by the tellingly named Towering Inferno, with huge back projections depicting the march of Fascism and the attempted destruction of a race. Whether you'd get the theme without the visuals is debatable, but either way the music is ear-splittingly intense. One moment avant-garde, the next a haunting lament, all the while punctuated by ferocious martial drumming. The overall effect isn't that far away from the path Test Department and Laibach have been thundering along for the past 15 years, though with less posturing and a less ambiguous intent.

Sir: Now that the promenade concert season is with us again I would like to know why home orchestras at concerts in London rarely, if ever, play encores - no matter how enthusiastically their performance has been received. Visiting foreign orchestras can be relied upon to continue to entertain with two or three additional pieces at the end of the published programme.

Saturday's Ravi Shankar concert saw the Barbican foyer packed with fans - sitting, laughing, strolling or nibbling samosas - while, inside the hall, warm stage-lighting revealed a large Indian rug, a wispy trail of incense and a modest array of microphones. Up on stage came two girls with bass and treble tamporas (small sitars that set a tonally unchanging drone), Partho Sarathy and his lute-like sarod, Sukhvinder Singh and Bikram Ghosh - fast-fisted tabla-players who could have given Gene Krupa a run for his money - and the 14-year-old Anoushka Shankar, a beautiful if passive presence, here making her European debut.

From Mr Paul M. Pearson

The Centenary Season of the BBC Henry Wood Proms opens on Friday with a record 70 concerts. On 25 July, at the Royal Albert Hall, Pierre Boulez conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Singers in a concert of 20th-century classics with music by Bartok, Debussy and Messiaen. The concert will also include Boulez's Le Soleil des Eaux with American soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson.

Music:BRINDISI QUARTET / ELLIOTT CARTER;Aldeburgh Festival

Sir: Your leader 'Future is culture fed through cable' (20 June) took my mind back 70 years to the days when we listened to concerts via the telephone wires on my grandfather's electrophone. He would ask the exchange to put him through to the concert hall and we listened on headphones that were kept in a wooden box like a lady's workbox.

Riccardo Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini has had to wait 80 years for its second UK outing - in a concert performance by the Chelsea Opera Group tonight in the QEH. Based on Gabriele d'Annunzio's Dantesque drama, the opera tells of Francesca's doomed love affair with her tyrant husband's brother Paolo. Covent Garden gave the UK premiere in July 1914, five months after its Turin prima. So why the wait? 'It's the sort of music the British get snotty about,' says Hannah Francis, tonight's Francesca. 'You know, Hollywood Bowl stuff. But it's absolutely glorious, unbelievably romantic. This may be a concert performance, but you can't just stand there - you have to act.'

Anne Shelton - the forces' youngest sweetheart during the Second World War - will lead the London Docklands D-Day Commemorative concert at Cabot Hall, Canary Wharf, on 6 June.