Bartók's two violin concertos were composed three decades apart, and Isabelle Faust here skilfully brings out the contrasts between youth and maturity, particularly in her detailed attention to the composer's instructions regarding phrasing and articulation in the “Violin Concerto No. 1”. Terms such as “utterly desolate”, “always volatile”, “dreamlike” and “exhausted” hint at the emotional tenor of a work written in romantic fever, which moves from the blissful serenity of the first movement to the more playful, teasing disposition of the second, which presages his later spikier, more angular style. The “Violin Concerto No. 2” is a masterpiece given its head by Faust, the captivating, rhapsodic opening passage heralding a remarkable performance.

There is little that is more quintessentially British than the proms, but on Thursday the Royal Albert Hall will hear a youth orchestra from the Occupied Territories, which has been asked to perform alongside Nigel Kennedy. The Palestine Strings travelled to London today.

He famously reduced the conductor Josef Krips to tears during rehearsals with the LSO

Acclaimed musician Min-Jin Kym has talked of her “elation” after the British Transport Police tracked down her Antonio Stradivarius violin, worth £1.2m, following an almost three year search.

Chastity Brown is that rarity, an R&B singer not in thrall to the diva delusion. Her folk-blues style instead comes from an earthier tradition – she cites the influence Leadbelly had on Woody Guthrie as a pivotal moment in her musical development.

When I was about 14 my brother's girlfriend bought me a couple of second-hand books for my birthday. One was a picture-book of Victorian sheet music covers and the other was the The Lost Stradivarius by J Meade Falkner. She had bought them for me because she knew that I loved music. Indeed, I loved music so much back then that I often neglected to read.

Somewhere in the intersecting corridors of jazz, modernist composition, Scando-folk and early church music, there’s a small interior chamber that’s not quite silent, and this is what you’ll find there.

A country churchyard lush with meadow flowers, a coop of happy hens nearby …. The seductive location is typical of where The Rude Mechanical Theatre Company nightly strikes its stage. Each summer, they tow their two-storey wagon to commons and stubble fields across England’s southern counties. In style, though, they are travelling players of 16th-century Italy. It’s just a pity they can’t have Italian weather. 

Burt Bacharach strolls onto the Festival Hall stage like he's stepping on board a yacht, the brass buttons on his blazer gleaming in the spotlight. A brief pause to acknowledge the applause, then the captain takes the helm of his Steinway to steer his crew smoothly through a half-century of hits.

New measures to address high-profile failures in child-grooming cases and Jimmy Savile scandal

The musician who pelted Simon Cowell with eggs on live TV has offered to pay his cleaning bill but said she was not sorry for attacking him.

Woman's Hour presenter Jenni Murray has announced that she will be conducting the BBC Philharmonic orchestra - despite not being able to read music.

Why do all female classical musicians have to be thin and sexy?

This debut programme from the gifted young violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen is themed around Euro-American musical interaction of the inter-war years, when classical composition was becoming influenced by black American idioms.