Mogwai's latest album is the soundtrack to the acclaimed French supernatural drama series The Returned, and they've done a respectful job of augmenting the atmosphere of melancholy, contemplation and unease.

The centrepiece of this album by American pianist/composer Timo Andres is Mozart's “Piano Concerto No. 26 in D”, for which he provides the missing left-hand piano parts and cadenzas, an ambitious and confident performance resulting in a compelling blend of ancient and modern. Andres' own “Home Stretch” was itself conceived as a companion piece to another Mozart concerto, but its jagged and disruptive combinations of high, piercing winds and scattered piano figures resolve into an absorbing musical conversation that sounds more about American music, with its bustling drive and echoes of Copland, Ives and Adams.

Press "Play" and stand well back: RR+P's 1981 debut is still strong stuff, with a level of energy and experiment that shames today's boho fringe.

Sven Helbig is a young German composer equally drawn to classical, pop and hip-hop modes, probably most famous for his orchestrations on Pet Shop Boys' Battleship Potemkin and The Most Incredible Thing. That populist spirit informs this debut release, with emotionally expansive pieces restricted to pop-song length.

Album of the week: Borrell's back but that razor-sharp rock'n'roll is missing

Russian President Vladimir Putin was spotted yesterday descending into the briny depths below to inspect a sunken Russian sailing frigate.

I wonder who first applied the adjective “great” to the term “train robbery”? A sub-editor on the Mirror or Express, I imagine. He or she might well have intended it to describe size rather than worth, but it’s a sign of how we remain titillated by the events of half a century ago.

Young French composer Bruno Mantovani studied with Boulez at Ircam before embarking on his meteoric rise. Recorded with piercing clarity, this selection of pieces performed by various combinations of pianist Claire Désert and the Trio Wanderer reveals certain distinctive tropes, notably a liking for repetitive trills and throbbing rhythmic pulses, contrasted in his inward-looking, almost solipsistic piano sonata “Suonare” with a more contemplative counterpoint.

The classical double-bass repertoire is so meagre that even virtuosi like the late Stefano Scodanibbio were forced to create their own material or transcribe works written for other instruments. Scodanibbio's former colleague Daniele Roccato is comparatively spoilt for choice here by Sofia Gubaidulina's pioneering piano duets of the Sixties and Seventies, “Sonata” and “Pantomime”.

The big revelation of Britten’s centenary year is turning out to be sheer multifariousness of his creation, generating a multitude of short works alongside the symphonic and operatic masterpieces. Some of those short works are masterpieces too, notably the five Canticles which fit no known category.

Paul Smith, a jazz pianist, composer and arranger who worked with such greats as Bing Crosby, Nat "King" Cole and Dizzy Gillespie, has died at 91.

Piano-maker sold in £288m deal

After we had made 'Telstar'," the pianist Roger LaVern told me in 2009, "I thought it was a strange piece of music and I wasn't even sure if I liked it. When it started climbing the charts, I started to like it and now I find it absolutely incredible to think that I was involved with something so iconic."

Big, slow, Australian, conceptual art-pop. And if that weren’t enough, it’s quite good, too: a poeticised music of reflection, mood and observation.