The funny bit in Hans Werner Henze's big, German, un-funny, anti-fascist Ninth Symphony, given its British premiere at the Proms this year, was the third movement. A Nazi official was delivering a typed report of his latest outrage. A task force of the BBC Symphony Orchestra - castanets, rattles, bongos, cymbals, glockenspiels, tubular bells und so weiter - accompanied his despatch with a full-scale clicking and tapping National Socialist typewriter. [...]

The coup de theatre at the end of a recent staged version of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion at the London Coliseum was when a snowy white lamb was brought on stage. What a laugh. The lamb went "baa", then "baa" again, loudly, just as the work's last great chorus lapsed into silence. Did the Lutheran congregation at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig on Good Friday, 1724, hearing the work's [...]

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau grips a park bench amid a prospect of fallen leaves; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sits warmed by an evening glow; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau retreats, coated, out of the camera's frame. The photographs in the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau birthday boxed set from Deutsche Grammophon - 21 CDs, a minuscule proportion of a life's work - are autumnal, to say the least.

They prompt various responses, such as: a) how appropriate for a man [...]

Heartfelt tributes flooded in on the occasion of Pandit Ravi Shankar's 80th birthday on 7 April. On Radio 4, the actor and manufacturer of root vegetable crisps, Terence Stamp, offered considered insights into the "marriage of the esoteric East and the intellectual West", and recalled how it had been Marlon Brando who introduced him to the sitar maestro "at a gathering in LA" in the Sixties. George Harrison informed us [...]

We get used to the style of Channel 4's new classical music series. By the fourth programme, we positively expect the presenter to put a crash helmet on his head, climb into a sports car bearing the number plate LUDWIG 1, and burn rubber at the first mention of the name of Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven turned the piano "into a performance power-house", he tells us. The composer "gave the [...]

The elegiac tone is in favour these days. So it is a nice surprise that a new CD of pieces by contemporary composers in memory of Linda McCartney, who died of cancer in 1998, is not in fact one long sob. Sir Paul McCartney's own piece, to his own text, in memory of his wife, is inevitably a little sad. But even here the question "Are you there?" receives a [...]

The most recent CD from the pianist Murray Perahia is called Songs Without Words. It features Schubert songs arranged by Liszt, Bach vocal music arranged by Busoni and a group of "songs without words" by Mendelssohn. Of course, the piano can't sing. It is a bunch of wood, wires and heavy metal. But Perahia makes it seem to sing, and this recital is one of the most fastidiously beautiful he [...]

The composer Thomas Ades was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition at the end of last year. He was named in the Sunday Times Power List as one of the "top 20 creative forces in the arts". And on Christmas Day he had an opera about oral sex on the television.

In fact Ades received a double dose of the Channel 4 treatment over the holiday season. There was [...]

Glenn Gould arrived in Manhattan in the hot summer of 1955 wearing coat, beret, muffler and gloves. He had come to record Bach's Goldberg Variations and brought his usual equipment: "music portfolio, batch of towels, two large bottles of spring water, five small bottles of pills and his own special chair" on which he would sit, almost certainly, with his legs crossed. Gould was neurotic. The least deniable criticism of [...]

John Dowland's song "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" expresses emotional intensity to an "extent unsurpassed in any other song of the Elizabethan period". So it was extra generous of the performers on a new CD to furnish the song with further particulars. Dowland's melancholy masterpiece is prefaced on In Darkness Let Me Dwell by the shuddering of double bass and the moaning of saxophone; the howl, later, of what sounds [...]