Families

John Wilson is probably best known for his light-entertainment orchestral work, especially his restorations of classic film scores – a background which, it turns out, equips him well for this anthology of British musical landscapes.

It’s testimony to the extraordinary interest which counter-tenor Iestyn Davies now arouses that his weekday lunchtime recital was packed.

After 20 years of knocking about with the best in the business, the tenor Mark Padmore has some distinguished people to call on for a concert billed as "Mark Padmore and Friends".

You may not have seen any posters, but an impromptu festival of British music has just begun. It will close on Saturday 10 September at the Last Night of the Proms with pieces by the Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the elder statesman of British music, Benjamin Britten, and the sing-a-long-a-lollipops Land of Hope and Glory, Rule Britannia and Jerusalem.

If you don't like England, you're probably sitting next to Martin Amis on a plane right now, seeking some civilisation more worthy or cerebral than our own. Well, I don't know about that, but I've just spent a week in New York and I can't tell you what joy it is to come back to British radio. Granted, this week has been a little more introspective than usual. Vaughan Williams came in both second and third in Classic FM's Britain's best loved piece of classical music, The Archers and Gardeners' Question Time, those bastions of Middle England, engaged in radio incest, and everyone braced themselves for tomorrow's big one. But as a place to look out at the world, British radio takes some beating.

Malcolm Smith was one of those unsung heroes whose efforts glue the fabric of musical life together. Joining the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes as manager of the Hire Library in 1969, he got to know thousands of musicians, whose decisions often depended on his efficiency. If you were a conductor or orchestral manager planning to perform, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring or an opera-house intendant putting on Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, it was Smith and his team who made sure the performing material – the parts the musicians put on their music-stands – was up to date and delivered on time.

These days Sir Roger Norrington tends to stop, look, and listen rather than get stuck in; it’s almost as if it is someone else’s performance and not his own that he is enjoying.

Sometimes it behoves even card-carrying atheists to accept a little harmless mumbo-jumbo.