The National's quiet, steady ascent presents the Cincinnati band with a problem on their sixth album: how to crown their rise without losing the ATP/Pitchfork crowd which nurtured them.

Female artists have sung Winterreise before, but not with the intensity of mezzo-soprano Alice Coote.

Solange ft Kendrick Lamar

Maurice Gendron, who taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School, was allegedly a sadist who abused his young students

The news that OperaUpClose were planning to stage Verdi’s A Masked Ball in an IKEA store did not sound promising, as we’d been there before. In 2009 Flatpack Opera made Wembley IKEA the venue and subject of a work whose audience was joined by bemused shoppers, not all of whom were keen to be plunged into an art event which began in the bedsit department and ended in kitchens. At least OperaUpClose were doing it in a kosher theatre.

A provocative interpretation plunges a Handel oratorio into the violent era of modern Israel’s foundation

Following the burden of hype placed upon the electro-pop singer’s debut, she’s gone low-key for this follow-up, self-releasing and adopting a clubbier, more crepuscular sound.

Composer Geert van Keulen reshapes Brahms’s Clarinet Sonatas in F minor and E flat major after the model of his Clarinet Quintet in this alluring disc of arrangements.

You can take sax star Redman tootling ballads to the accompaniment of strings in two ways.

Lord Judge directs judiciary to name those being jailed and give details of their offence

Widely tipped for success, Anglo-American duo MS MR deal in a similar kind of blandly alienated, metrosexual pop to Hurts, with Lizzy Plapinger's sultry-soulful vocals allied to Max Hershenow's electronic pop arrangements.

Battersea Arts Centre has a fine track record for picking out fresh talents, nurturing them and then letting them bloom in the nooks and crannies of its magnificent building. Jerry Springer the Opera started life at a scratch night here. And in 2007, a young company called Punchdrunk famously filled the place with their Masque of the Red Death.

The memory rush as the first few songs hit is almost overwhelming. Dionne Warwick sang some of the most perfectly crafted pop of the 20th century, and now here she is, in a tent in Cheltenham aged 72, doing so again a yard from me.

Hannigan dazzles in Berg's Lulu Suite