Something very exciting happens in Philippe Herreweghe’s recording of Mozart’s last three symphonies.

Usually, period-instrument performance involves the wielding of antiquaria like sackbut and theorbo in renaissance settings.

Polish your Spanish or life drawing skills, or learn to forage and then cook your harvest with this range of engrossing courses

Francesco Piemontesi brings together two oddities: Schumann's Piano Concerto is a dreamlike dialogue between soloist and orchestra, while Dvorák's rather dull work has slid into obscurity.

This third offering from These New Puritans is distinctly uneasy listening. Poised on the cusp of indie and classical, there is a laborious, tortuous formality about songs such as “Fragment Two” and “V”, with their peculiar, jerky time-signatures and lowering orchestrations.

KT Tunstall's fourth album is by some distance her best, offering a series of deeply-felt musings on mortality, mercy and memory. Recorded at Howe Gelb's Wavelab Studio in Arizona in two sessions separated by a season – hence the different titles for the separate “sides” – it reflects her response to the death of her father, the first side's sensitive, reactions gradually supplanted by a new emotional light as her branches become strong enough to “play with the wind” and “carry the snow” again.

Recorded by the sea in Aldeburgh, Herbert's sort-of concept album is changeable as the ocean.

The teaming of Mark Lanegan with multi-instrumentalist bluesman Duke Garwood is an alliance of congruent attitudes and approaches, Garwood's layered guitar lines and soft shaker percussion forming an apt backdrop to Lanegan's weathered baritone on the gospel-blues of "Pentecostal", while more saturnine drones and loops colour the darker concerns of "Death Rides a White Horse" and "Thank You".

Louis Armstrong singing spiritual-jazz anthem "The Creator Has a Masterplan" (and sounding great) is one of the more bizarre experiences on this neat compendium of black consciousness from the vaults of Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman label.

In 2011, Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra played two BBC Proms in one night. The first was a meticulously disciplined programme of Liszt and Mahler, the second a jamboree of party pieces and encores, selected by raffle from a list of some 200 works. Encores are the great disinhibitors of classical music and they have served Fischer and his orchestra well. Now 30 years old, the BFO can melt the cognoscenti with musical kitsch, compete with the finest in core symphonic repertoire, and deliver Beethoven with the transparency of period instruments. Whether this should all be attempted in one performance is another matter.

The second volume of James MacMillan's projected four-album series for Challenge finds him conducting the Netherlands Chamber Philharmonic and Netherlands Radio Choir on the premiere of his Advent antiphon “Ó”, in which lowering strings shade treble choral harmonies either side of a central solo trumpet passage, its divine nobility haloed by the choir's extended “O”.

A perpetual voyager is saved by selflessness and a terrific chorus

Early woodwind virtuoso François Lazarevitch, Les Musiciens and the earthy-toned singers Simone Sorini, Enea Sorini and Marc Busnel take us back to the time when street parties lasted a week or more.

Ethnomusicologists are like bees, with melodies being the pollen they transfer from culture to culture. In the 1950s the great American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax went on a song-collecting trip to Italy, and brought back recordings of a wealth of music which is now mostly extinct.