The voice is scrunched a little tighter now, and frayed, and the tunes seem worn to the bone, but… Well, you can't keep a good man down.

Comparison between the two sides shows that England should have the batting strength to win a third series in a row

Here's a surprise. After a decade of fine, restrained albums that interrogated the indignities of mid-life malaise, the 52-year-old Cole kicks against the pricks of his advancing years.

Stephen Dodgson composed music in most forms, though his more than 40 scores including guitar ensured him a specialist following among guitarists. His First Guitar Concerto, written in 1956 for Julian Bream and played by a teenage John Williams, was set for popularity, but tended to be eclipsed by Malcolm Arnold's Concerto, which Bream introduced soon afterwards.

The French organ virtuoso Marie-Claire Alain was that rare jewel: a teenage musical prodigy who matured into one of the finest and most sought after recitalists and teachers.

We've got a special one here.

Those familiar with Prokofiev mostly through Peter and the Wolf will be shocked at the Modernist invention of his lesser-known early piano works, delivered with enthusiastic conviction by Roger Woodward in these 1991 recordings.

Schoenberg’s second string quartet caused a bigger riot than anything else he composed: after the first bar of the second movement his Viennese audience burst into laughter, and went on disrupting it until the coda mysteriously calmed them down.

Soprano Rebecca Bottone is one of the most versatile performers on the operatic stage today. She gets her charisma from her father, the tenor Bonaventura Bottone, but her chameleon ability is all her own.

It’s usually taken as axiomatic that while pianists reach their technical peak at twenty, they need much longer to hone their artistry, and one of the merits of the Southbank’s current International Piano Series is that it’s allowing us to test this view against reality.

This collection of collaborative covers trawls Holland's Hootenanny shows, with a dozen specially recorded tunes thrown in.

... but that doesn't mean you have to keep on re-recording them. Gillian Orr wonders if there's ever any point in a rock'n'roll do-over