The Keller Quartett are a Hungarian group, here showcasing two of their countryman György Ligeti's astringent string quartets of the Fifties and Sixties, separated by the calm lacuna of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, from the Thirties.

18th Century cabinet maker honoured with Doodle

It's rather apt that John Eliot Gardiner's marathon cycle of Bach cantatas should finally be completed with those written for Ascension Day, recorded at St Giles Cripplegate 12 years after the original “pilgrimage” recordings of 2000. The four cantatas feature mostly new soloists but sustain the series' high standards.

The star of the Ashcan School was influenced by the Impressionists. Yet for all the surface charm, his work shows a fear of what lies beneath

Room Service

New York reserves its tickertape parades for returning heroes – and in 1958 America had no greater hero than a young concert pianist from Texas named Van Cliburn. That spring he had travelled to Moscow to take part in the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition, an event intended to showcase Russian superiority in classical music. And, against every rational probability of that Cold War era, Cliburn won.

Alejandro Zambra's first novel, Bonsai, brought the young Chilean poet international fame. It was followed by The Private Lives of Trees, which retained interest in the author. In this, his third and longest – but still very short – novel, translated by Megan McDowell, Zambra uses the ploy of describing the author at work on his new book which, needless to say, is the one we are reading. Zambra adopted similar metafictional devices in its two predecessors.

The Bach Cantata Pilgrimage undertaken in 2000 by John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir, performing all of Bach's cantatas on the appropriate days in churches across Europe and America, is one of the great musical achievements of recent times.

Paperback reviews of the week

An hour of The Thick of It and not an oath that didn't come fenced by quotation marks.

Patterson was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1996 for The Great Bear, a reworking of the London Tube map that substituted all the station names for that of celebrities, Old Masters and Chinese dissidents.

Concerto for hairies and orchestra

A celebrated painting by Edouard Manet has been saved for the nation after an eight-month public campaign raised £7.8m to prevent it heading overseas. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford called it the "most significant acquisition" in its history.

This riveting Dutch bestseller will leave its readers feeling thrilled, chilled or cheated.