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Our critics' picks of this week's openings, plus your last chance to see and what to book now

• Which cultural events are in your diary this week? Tell us in the comments below

Opening this weekTheatre

A Provincial Life
Russia comes to Wales as Peter Gill returns to the city of his birth to christen the rebuilt Sherman theatre with his own adaptation of Chekhov's short story. The 17th National Theatre Wales production is about the search for equality in a world of rich and poor. Sherman, Cardiff (029-2064 6901), Thursday to 17 March.

The Lady from the Sea
Joely Richardson follows in the wet footsteps of both her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her sister, Natasha, in playing Ellida Wangel, Ibsen's mysterious heroine haunted by memories of a sailor and the sea. Rose, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey (0844 482 1556), tonight to 17 March.

Film

Rampart (dir. Oren Moverman)
James Ellroy is the screenwriter of this gripping tale of a dirty LAPD cop. Woody Harrelson is the crooked officer, facing a brutal endgame. Out now.

Dance

Ballet Black: Short Dance Works
As always, this small-scale company punches above its weight, with brand new repertory from the likes of Christopher Hampson and Martin Lawrance. Linbury Studio Theatre at Royal Opera House, London (020-7304 4000), Wednesday to 6 March.

Classical/opera

Tristan and Isolde
Andris Nelsons continues his Wagnerian exploration, conducting the CBSO in a concert performance, with Stephen Gould and Lioba Braun as the doomed lovers. Symphony Hall, Birmingham (0121-345 0600), Saturday, 4pm.

The Turn of the Screw
Oliver Mears directs NI Opera's latest production, with Fiona Murphy as the haunted governess and Andrew Tortise as Peter Quint. Theatre at the Mill, Newtonabbey (028-9034 0202), Friday; Riverside theatre, Coleraine (028-7012 3123), 3 March; then touring to Omagh, Belfast and the Buxton festival, Derbyshire.

Jazz

Portico Quartet
Portico's music – their unique hang-drum sound and rich electronic effects – grow increasingly varied and subtle. Expect trancelike grooves, hooks and cinematic themes from the 2008 Mercury prize nominees. Komedia, Brighton (0845 293 8480), Thursday; Sage, Gateshead (0191-443 4661), 5 March. Touring until 10 March.

Art

AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible
With concerts, walks, exhibitions and screenings throughout the north-east, the International Festival of Art, Technology, Music and Film features On Kawara, John Gerrard, Manon de Boer and a bewildering roster of film-makers, artists and musicians. Take your time. Details: 0191 227 5512, Thursday to 31 March.

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan
The high point of the late Italian arte povera artist's major retrospective are the wonderful world maps he commissioned: embroidered by craftswomen in Afghanistan, they present a magic-carpet atlas of the modern world. Tate Modern, London (020-7887 8888), Tuesday to 27 May.

Pop

Laura Marling
Self-possessed folk-pop darling, ascending to ever-greater commercial heights with last year's A Creature I Don't Know. Cambridge Corn Exchange, Thursday (01223 357851); Then touring (0844 811 0051).

Mark Lanegan Band
Officially the scariest man in rock, Lanegan turns his attention to dance music, among other things, on his latest album, Blues Funeral. O2 Academy, Bristol (0844 477 2000), Sunday; then touring.

Last chance to seeTheatre

'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Jacobean revenge drama is very much back in fashion, and John Ford's wild and gory incest-fest gets a terrific revival by Cheek by Jowl in a production set around the teenage Arabella's bed. Silk Street theatre, London (0845 120 7550), until 10 March.

Film

Like Crazy (dir. Drake Doremus)
Here's what One Day could have been. Felicity Jones stars in a story of love and bad timing. Out now.

Classical

Norma
Christopher Alden's fierce, industrialised staging of Bellini's bel canto masterpiece for Opera North, with Annemarie Kremer as the vengeful druid priestess. The Lowry, Salford Quays (0843 208 6000), Wednesday and Saturday; Theatre Royal, Newcastle (0844 811 2121), 7 and 10 March.

Jazz

Baptiste Trotignon
Jazz and crossover pianist Trotignon has been winning rising-star prizes – for his tradition-steeped approach inflected by classical, rock, and all manner of world-music influences. This Partager festival gig pairs him with Argentinian tango drummer Minino Garay. Vortex, London (020-7254 4097), Monday. 

Pop

Simple Minds
Credible once more, Simple Minds tour songs from their first five incredible albums. HMV Ritz Manchester (0843 221 0976), Saturday.

Jonathan Richman
Nothing much changes in the world of Jonathan Richman, which means he remains as entertaining a live performer as it's possible to be. Tour ends Union Chapel, London (020-7403 3331), 2 March.

Art

Hanne Darboven
Obsession and repetition, music, notation and numbers mark the passing of time in the late German artist's curious and moving art. A strange and static music plays, in your head as well as across the walls. Camden Arts Centre, London (020-7472 5500), ends 18 March.

Book nowTheatre

Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad
Baghdad's Iraqi Theatre Company re-imagine the star-crossed lovers, with the country's musical and poetic traditions infusing the story, which is given extra relevance by Sunni and Shia divisions. Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon (0844 800 1110), 12 April to 5 May.

Ann Liv Young: Mermaid Show
The provocative New York performance artist explores the allure of myth in a show in which the fairytale meets the grotesque and which could turn out to be a mite smelly, as it features raw fish. The Arches, Glasgow (0141-565 1000), 31 March to 1 April.

The Just Price of Flowers
The enormous demand for tulips in 17th-century Europe is used to explore the 2008 financial collapse as Stan's Café theatre troupe consider the futures market, sub-prime mortgages, short selling and credits ratings in playful fashion. Features origami, too. AE Harris Factory, Birmingham (0121-236 4455), 15 June to 30 June.

Film

Michael (dir. Markus Schleinzer)
This chilling movie, directed by Michael Haneke's former casting director, is a disturbing study of a paedophile who keeps a 10-year-old child locked in a basement. Out 2 March.

Dance

Royal Ballet Mixed Bill
One of the year's most exciting programmes of contemporary ballets, with new works from both Wayne McGregor and rising star Liam Scarlett, plus a revival of Christopher Wheeldon's tautly beautiful Polyphonia. Royal Opera House, London (020-7304 4000), 5-23 April.

Classical

Total Immersion: Brett Dean
The latest of the BBC's composer days is devoted to the 50-year-old Australian, and includes the UK premiere of his Grawemeyer award-winning violin concerto, The Lost Art of Letter Writing. Barbican, London (020-7638 8891) 17 March.

Art

Thomas Ruff
Photographer Thomas Ruff's pictures are derived from Nasa images of Mars and from internet pornography. His images – enlarged and adulterated, pixelated and smeared – are barely photographs at all, more a kind of painting by proxy. Gagosian galleries (Davies St and Britannia St), London , 8 March to 21 April.

Pop

Rizzle Kicks
Appealingly effervescent, Day-Glo take on pop-rap, informed more by late 1980s hip-hop than grime or rave. Tour begins at Leamington Spa Assembly (01926 311311), 26 April.

• Dance
• Classical music
• Art
• Theatre
• Jazz
• Pop and rock

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Assembly Rooms, Bath

After many decades, Bath's final Bach festival was in 2010, but it's been reborn as the BachFest under the artistic direction of Amelia Freedman, whose November MozartFest goes from strength to strength. At present, the BachFest only amounts to a weekend, but success is assured judging from this opening concert by the Academy of Ancient Music with violinist Alina Ibragimova.

Making her debut as soloist/director with the AAM, Ibragimova's serene demeanour as always belied her cast-iron technique and her unerring ability to bring a freshness and spontaneity to the music. Comparing Bach's concertos with those of Vivaldi and offering Heinrich Biber as their starting point made for a revelatory sequence. Ibragimova began with Biber's solo G minor Passacaglia from his Rosary Sonatas, each note of the simple theme given an innocent intensity, with tension gradually built while pointing up the ever-more elaborate filigree patterning of the variations. Bach's E major Sonata, BWV 1016, with harpsichordist Alistair Ross, then served to further attune the ear to a denser texture and burgeoning technical complexities, so that the A minor Concerto, BWV 1041, could emerge in shimmering new light. The mercurial flow that Ibragimova brought to the phrasing, together with the translucent beauty of her tone-colours, made for a riveting experience and the purity of the Adagio in the E major concerto, BWV 1042, was simply sublime.

Yet it was the fiery passion of Ibragimova's Vivaldi that captured the imagination most vividly: first in the Concerto in D minor RV 234, L'Inquietudine, and then with Rodolfo Richter and Joseph Crouch in the Concerto for two violins and cello, RV 565, all breathtaking stuff. Not everything was ethereal: Biber's Battaglia spelled down-to-earth humour, and the AAM revelled in the contrast.

Rating: 4/5

• Classical music
• JS Bach

Rian Evans
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Coliseum, London

In the event it all passed off quite peacefully. The demonstration against the staging of The Death of Klinghoffer that had been predicted in some sections of the press appeared to be limited to one person standing outside the Coliseum and brandishing a rather small poster, and at the final curtain the composer, his work and English National Opera's production were all warmly received.

Twenty-one years after it was first seen in Brussels, John Adams's second opera has finally reached the London stage. This a fine, intelligent treatment of it, though some aspects inevitably underline the work's fundamental problems, which have nothing to do with its political agenda, whether real or imagined, and everything to do with the way in which the work is conceived dramatically, and the language in which Alice Goodman's libretto is couched.

For in many ways The Death of Klinghoffer is more a reflection on the infamous Palestinian hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean in 1985, and the subsequent death of one of its passengers, the Jewish, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, than a depiction of the event itself. It's the absence of that narrative element in the text, and the effect that has on the music which Adams composed, that robs the work of a real dramatic spine. For the first act at least the score seems much closer to oratorio than opera, with much more meditation and recollection than real-time action, and the overwrought imagery and sheer opacity of Goodman's text only exacerbate it. The pace quickens in the second half – a narrative thread more or less runs through it – and the dramatic focus is sharper, but the final impression is blurred.

Tom Morris's production (designed by Tom Pye) works hard to compensate for the opera's failure to tell its own story. Significant dates are flashed up on the set, explanatory captions supply historical context, and if the effect is to make the piece seem more of a documentary than Adams and Goodman ever intended, then it's an unfortunate necessity. The stage pictures are economical, carefully managed and effective – the chorus unfurl green flags as Palestinians, carry olive trees as Israelis. Little is stylised, though some episodes are choreographed (by Arthur Pita) and enough grainy realism remains to make the true nature of the tragedy vivid.

What emerges clearly too from the performance under Baldur Brönnimann is the sheer beauty of so much of Adams's score, with its dark-hued sonorities, chromatically inflected harmonies and keening instrumental lines. The great choruses that provide the opera's structural pillars are superbly sung by the ENO Chorus, though it's a real shame that the ravishing one that opens the second act has been cut here. All of the solo roles are taken memorably too, whether it's the cameos from Kathryn Harries as the Austrian woman, Lucy Schaufer as the Swiss grandmother, and Kate Miller-Heidke as the British dancing girl, or the major contributions from Christopher Magiera as the Captain, Richard Burkhard as the hijacker Mamoud, Michaela Martens as Marilyn Klinghoffer and especially Alan Opie as Leon Klinghoffer himself, who sings his final number, the Aria of the Falling Body, which Adams calls a gymnopédie, with devastating simplicity.

While the place in the repertory for The Death of Klinghoffer remains unclear – does it belong in the opera house or, perhaps slightly modified, in the concert hall? – ENO's production does underline its musical worth, and its timeless seriousness. It's a major achievement.

Rating: 4/5

• Classical music
• English National Opera (ENO)
• Opera

Andrew Clements
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Royal Albert Hall; Wigmore Hall; Barbican, London

"Set amid the ruins of ancient Egypt", promised the fliers. The impresario Raymond Gubbay has achieved many feats in his 45 years in showbiz but transporting the city of Thebes or the Temple of Vulcan to the Royal Albert Hall is not yet one. But he's had a darned good try in his latest opera-in-the-round blockbuster, Verdi's Aida, directed by Stephen Medcalf and designed by Isabella Bywater, which opened to a packed Royal Albert Hall last Thursday.

It won't be to all tastes. Amplified opera never is, but the technology has improved beyond complaint and has its place. Gubbay, never one to give up, has wooed opera traditionalists over the years as standards have risen. Yet his core audience is refreshingly different from elsewhere, as well as attentive and loyal. There may be longueurs but it's worth the wait for the climactic choruses when a 100-strong ensemble belt their hearts out, here excellently drilled by Robin Newton. The headaches and strategies for getting nearly double that number, with dancers and actors, on and off stage was achieved with aplomb. Some of the solo singing is admirable even if some is not, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Greenwood, gave secure, skilful support.

Despite its popularity and the splendour of the music, Aida always proves elusive to stage. It has two dramatic high points: the Grand March and the lovers' death by suffocation in a tomb. The first half offers ceremony and spectacle, the second private tragedy. Medcalf's idea was to celebrate the coincidence that the opera, commissioned by the khedive of Egypt for Cairo's new opera house, and the Albert Hall both date from 1871. European curiosity about north Africa was growing; exoticism was all the rage; ancient sites were being dug up or plundered by anyone with a trowel.

Gubbay's was the outfit which pumped 10,000 gallons of water to enable Madame Butterfly to float in her cherry blossom-festooned home. It was no surprise, therefore, to see giant screens projecting the pyramids at Giza, the interior of a painted temple and the banks of the Nile under a brilliant blue sky: a virtual Baedeker itinerary of top tourist sites. The arena itself had been transformed into an archaeological site complete with tent, Victorian-Edwardian Egyptologists, truncated columns, broken sphinx-ish sculptures and piles of old stones. It was all so convincing that my opera-novice companion needed reassurance that the Albert Hall doesn't usually look like this.

The approach, far from vulgar – and having in the past seen lame camels, fat horses and druggy-looking elephants trundled in for the triumphal Grand March scene I have a few points of comparison – was almost too thoughtful. An air of bafflement accompanied the admittedly always slow opening: who was this irritating woman who seemed to have escaped from an EM Forster novel with her sketchbook in search of Mr Beebe and, ahem, a tomb with a view? The programme note explained that she was the famous journalist and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards, who made a boat trip up the Nile in 1873. The over-extended notion was that in visiting the sites she was awakening the ghosts of Aida, her rival Amneris and their love object Radames.

In the first of three casts the Italianate-sounding American Marc Heller, making his UK operatic debut as Radames, was alone in seeing the point of vowels and consonants. He scaled "Celeste Aida" with assurance and acted with the right kind of arms-akimbo gestures needed for this space. In the title role of the Ethiopian slave girl, Indra Thomas was sympathetic and looked magnificent but was off form vocally, struggling with top notes throughout. Claire Rutter and Catrin Aur, both strong performers, share the role for remaining performances. Some of the cameo roles were well taken and musical standards otherwise were high.

There was some rum dancing and the patterning of the triumphal scene, inspired by Nuremberg rallies and North Korean military parades, may have looked more spectacular from elsewhere – higher? – in the hall. Wet-look pre-Raphaelite-style priestesses disported in a fountain, and hooded priests – were they white Cistercians or Ku Klux Klan? – processed around the eternal flame of a sacred wok. Costumes were beautifully made. I was very taken with the prototype satellite dish the viperish Amneris (an effective Tiziana Carraro) wore on her head.

The ending was ducked: instead of being buried alive, Aida and Radames petrified into a funerary couple astride their tomb, and sat stiffly with the look of being strapped in for an interminable roller-coaster ride, which in a manner of speaking they were. But the crowd cheered, and the après comments were enthusiastic, illegibly capitalised surtitles aside. As I left, a young boy was telling his mother how moved he was. My opera virgin found the ending rather miserable but he has a lot to learn about opera in that respect.

You might think it was only a stone's throw from ancient Egypt to ancient Greece and Rome, from the fevered excitement of the Albert Hall to the pure air of Wigmore Hall. It was another planet. In the first of four events in the Bostridge Project: Ancient and Modern, the tenor Ian Bostridge and mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager sang solo cantatas in which figures from antiquity confront death.

The beauty of using small forces is that you can almost do as you fancy: two superstar singers, two fine ensembles (the English Concert and, squeezed on to the tiny stage, the Aurora Orchestra) and, in harpsichordist Laurence Cummings and conductor Nicholas Collon, two expert musical directors. This stood out as an evening of imagination and rigour, as well as thrilling music-making. Look out for it as a Wigmore Hall Live CD.

Bostridge shone as the villainous Nero in Alessandro Scarlatti's incandescent "Io son Neron, l'imperator del mondo" (1698), spitting out each vainglorious syllable with riveting conviction. Satie's "La mort de Socrate", instead, is a dispassionate but affecting narrative from his symphonic 1917-18 drama Socrate – limpid, "like running water", as his friend Poulenc described the aerated music.

After the untrammelled wildness of the raped Lucretia in Handel's "O numi eterni", Kirchschlager sang Britten's late work "Phaedra", from Robert Lowell's version of Racine. She was precise, impassioned and fiery in her agonies of doomed, incestuous love. The Aurora players gave meticulous support, especially in the tangy, 10-part string chords and in Iain Farrington's unearthly, spangly harpsichord flourishes.

Britten wrote "Phaedra" for Dame Janet Baker after hearing her sing Berlioz's Les nuits d'été at the 1975 Aldeburgh festival. No one can ever quite match Baker, perhaps, but last week we were lucky to have Joyce DiDonato in town – joining the illustrious New York Philharmonic and conductor Alan Gilbert for their Barbican residency – to give a bravura performance of that very work.

After the UK premiere of Thomas Adès's delicate, change-ringing Polaris and before some beady, steely Stravinsky, Berlioz's Gautier settings provided diaphanous contrast. DiDonato delivered an artlessly optimistic "Villanelle", a vaporous 'Le spectre de la rose" and a lilting "L'île inconnue" before bobbing off in the breeze to a land of undying love. Not that she had far to bob: the very walls of the Barbican hall, not to mention its inhabitants, were poised to embrace this adored diva whose modesty is an eternal miracle in itself.

• Classical music

Fiona Maddocks
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Soloists, Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révolutionnaire at Romantique/ Gardiner
(SDG)

Does the world need another recording of Brahms's German Requiem? A glance at Amazon shows there are dozens available, from big, broad Karajan and the Berlin Phil to finely focused Harry Christophers and the Sixteen. Yet John Eliot Gardiner convinces us that there is room for one more, even of a performance he and his garlanded choir gave four years ago at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh. The choral ensemble is superb; intonation perfect. Gardiner's instrumentalists' meticulous attention to authentic performance style adds a further dimension to a glorious reading of this beautiful piece. Highly recommended.

• Johannes Brahms
• Classical music

Stephen Pritchard
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Doric String Quartet etc
(Chandos)

After their highly praised recordings of the three quartets by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), the Dorics have expanded forces to perform the composer's two voluptuous early chamber works, written decades before the Hollywood film scores that would make this Austro-Hungarian composer famous. The String Sextet Op 10 (in which the Doric Quartet are joined by Jennifer Stumm, viola, and Bartholomew Lafollette, cello) was completed during the first world war, when Korngold was writing the opera Violanta. The works occupy a similarly lyrical, melancholy and highly chromatic sound world. The Piano Quintet (with Kathryn Stott) dates from slightly later and, with late Romantic echoes of Elgar and Rachmaninov, revolves round an expansive adagio consisting of nine free variations. The performances are superb.

• Classical music

Fiona Maddocks
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Werner Güra (tenor), Christoph Berner (piano)
(Harmonia Mundi)

Schubert wrote some 600 songs in his short life. The test for performers is how to select from the vast number outside the cycles – Die schöne Mullerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang. The excellent duo of German tenor Werner Güra and Viennese fortepianist Christoph Berner have constructed their own thoughtful cycle based around the Goethe setting "Wilkommen und Abschied". The life, loves and losses of a fictional Romantic are portrayed, from youth ("Schlummerlied"), through adolescent rapture ("Ganymed") to death ("Nocturne"), making gentle but never coercive psychological sense. Berner, playing an 1872 Rönisch fortepiano, shows keen attention to every detail. Güra, outstanding in his unfussy, intense delivery, is a formidable, rousing guide.

• Franz Schubert
• Classical music

Fiona Maddocks
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A series of events are planned in the city in 2012 to mark the 50th birthday of the band's formation

The Beatles will be remembered in a year-long season of music, film and verse in their home city of Liverpool.

The 12-month programme of cultural events will be focus on the 50th anniversary of the birth of the most enduringly popular music band, Jade Wright, of the Liverpool Echo, reported on Friday.

This year marks the half-century that has passed since the formation of the Beatles. In June, The Two of Us: The Lennon and McCartney Songbook will see the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra perform the band's songs over two evenings.

Michael Eakin, chief executive of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, said: "We're delighted to be playing our part in this special Beatles anniversary, paying our tribute to the four Liverpool lads whose music continues to have an extraordinary impact around the world."

At the beginning of December, there will be a Beatles weekend at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.

On 18 August, Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, will host a musical event celebrating the date that Ringo Starr made his Beatles debut. The next day, 19 August, marks the 50-year anniversary of the band's first gig at The Cavern.

International Beatles Week will commemorate the anniversary with bands and fans from all over the world arriving in Liverpool for gigs, guest speakers and the Beatles convention leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Mathew Street festival – the annual celebration of all things Beatles.

To celebrate the release of The Beatles' first single, a Love Me Do Weekend will take place at the Albert Dock over the weekend of 5 October to 7 October.

The leader of Liverpool city council, Joe Anderson, described it as "a hugely significant year in the history of the Beatles." He said its one that Liverpool couldn't let pass by without a large celebration.

He said the council never underestimates the power of The Beatles to attract visitors to the city, which will bring a much-needed boost to the local economy.

• Liverpool
• The Beatles
• Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
• John Lennon
• Paul McCartney
• Classical music
• Ringo Starr

Helen Carter
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Royal Albert Hall, London

Aida was premiered in Cairo in 1871, and this arena staging begins with extras playing archaeologists on a dig. During the rest of Stephen Medcalf's production, conducted by Andrew Greenwood, they are pared down to a single figure representing Amelia Edwards (played by Charlotte Medcalf), an eminent Victorian who devoted herself to the preservation of Egypt's ancient monuments.

Her presence may be an intrusion on Verdi's tale, a love story set against the background of Egypt's war against Ethiopia, but it is well handled. In other respects, this is a broadly traditional staging, retaining the loosely defined original period while delivering the narrative with keen intelligence. In what can be a difficult space for individual singers to handle, Medcalf's clarity allows the conflicts of interest burning within and between the central characters to register with unusual heat.

The Royal Albert Hall is also a tricky space for a designer, but Isabella Bywater achieves an unbroken sequence of effective stage pictures. Projections on vast screens extend the audience's vision to take in wider perspectives. The masterstroke is to beef up the impact of the triumph scene – opera's most famous victory parade – with reflected images tripling the already substantial personnel representing the Egyptian army, people and priestly ruling class, together with their maltreated Ethiopian prisoners.

Aida doesn't work without real spectacle at this point, but it also needs high-octane singing throughout. In the title role, Indra Thomas (pictured) is imposing and often exciting, if uneven. Tiziana Carraro's Amneris mines the contralto depths of her cast-iron mezzo when she takes on the hateful priests in the judgment scene. Marc Heller's Radames may be dramatically inhibited, but his ringing high notes are genuinely heroic. David Kempster makes a terrifyingly ruthless Amonasro, while Greenwood's authoritative interpretation consistently hits the spot.

Rating: 4/5

• Opera
• Giuseppe Verdi
• Classical music

George Hall
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Wigmore Hall, London

Steven Osborne's complete recording of Ravel's piano music was one of last year's outstanding keyboard releases. Now to mark the 75th anniversary of the composer's death, Osborne is repeating the cycle in a pair of concerts around the country.

Such a survey has to feature quite a number of one-off miniatures, and Osborne included eight of them as an unbroken group in this first recital, including the not-so-miniature Pavane pour une Infante Défunte and Jeux d'Eau, Ravel's early excursion into watery impressionism, which pre-dates anything similar by Debussy. The crystalline straightforwardness of Osborne's approach to Ravel – clean, sparkling textures without a trace of soupy pedal effects, exactly weighted chords and textures – proved as effective in characterising these smaller pieces as it did in the major works around them in his programme.

The Sonatine and the utterly different Gaspard de la Nuit had occupied the first half – the Sonatine neoclassically poised and restrained until the animé finale, when Osborne showed his teeth for the first time. Gaspard built slowly and implacably too, so that the fierceness with which the climax of the final Scarbo arrived was as overwhelming as it was unexpected – far more vicious than it seems in his recording.

If anything, though, the climax of the programme's final work was even more fiercely worked. The solo-piano version of La Valse was a preliminary stage in the composition of what became one of Ravel's greatest orchestral works. The cataclysm with which it all ends – the sound of European civilisation disintegrating – may not be as colourful in the keyboard version, but Osborne made sure it was devastatingly potent.

• Repeated at Perth Concert Hall (01738 621031) on Tuesday. The remaining recital in Osborne's survey of Ravel's piano music is at the Wigmore Hall (020-7935 2141) on 16 June.

Rating: 4/5

• Classical music

Andrew Clements
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The Reverb festival is a celebration of the best of contemporary classical music. Here are some of the highlights from Reverb 2010

This weekend, we've joined forces with the Roundhouse and A Room for London to bring you live streams of four concerts. From Imogen Heap to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Heiner Goebbels, here's what we have coming up

We've joined forces with Camden Roundhouse in London to live stream three of this year's concerts.

On Friday 24 February at 9pm, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Mark Elder perform excerpts from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet. Watch it live here, and read an introduction to the concert here.

On Saturday 25 February at 7.30pm, the Aurora Orchestra and Nicholas Collon perform Love Song for the City. Nicholas Collon introduces the evening's works here, download a copy of their programme here, and click here to watch the concert live.

And on Sunday 26 February the German composer and director Heiner Goebbels will be performing live from A Room for London: staging a musical response to Joseph Conrad's 1890 journal Up-River Book. Watch the performance live here.

Then, at 7.30pm, it's back to Reverb where Imogen Heap and the Holst Singers will perform her a cappella soundtrack to 1928 surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman. Watch the performance live here.

• Reverb festival 2012
• Classical music
• Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
• Aurora Orchestra
• Imogen Heap
• Pop and rock
• Mark Elder

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Rachel Millward, Founder and Director of Birds Eye View introduces the programme

19:15 Stream starts
19:30 Concert begins - Ana Silvera's set
20:20 Interval
20:55 Imogen Heap's Seashell and the Clergyman
22:00 Show ends

I founded Birds Eye View as a response to the fact that fewer than 10% of directors - and 15% of screenwriters - are women. And the stats for the music industry aren't much better - in 2010 women represented just 14% of the membership of the PRS Foundation (which collects royalties on behalf of composers and artists across the UK).

Sound & Silents is a flagship BEV project that faces both those stats head on. It breathes new life into classic silent films created by pioneering women of early cinema by presenting them alongside specially-commissioned scores from some of today's leading female musicians.

Tonight's film, Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman, premiered in Paris 74 years ago and portrays the erotic hallucinations of a priest lusting after a general's wife. While some saw it as the first Surrealist film, the film's scriptwriter Antonin Artaud declared Dulac's vision too narrative in structure to be truly Surrealist; and the British Board of Film Censors just didn't get it at all, dubbing it "apparently meaningless… [but] if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable."

We couldn't have hoped for a better team for our accompaniment, with Grammy and Ivor Novello Award-winner Imogen Heap's a capella score performed with the Holst Singers and conducted by the London Contemporary Orchestra's Hugh Brunt. I continue to be blown away by the sheer ambition of Imogen's vision, and her score's breathtaking combination of voices (and body parts) that fits the film – without ever overpowering it – beautifully. She is, to my mind, as pioneering an artist as Dulac was in her day.

I hope you enjoy the show.

• Reverb festival 2012
• Imogen Heap
• Pop and rock
• Classical music

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The final of our live streams is a concert featuring Imogen Heap who, with the Holst Singers, performs her a cappella soundtrack to the 1928 French surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman. Rising star Ana Silvera also performs with the Estonian Television Girls' Choir, and the evening closes with a collaboration between both singers. Watch it live here

Imogen Heap

My friend John Marshall, who has died of a brain aneurysm aged 49, was a natural impresario who believed passionately in "giving that sense of joy which is what I think the theatre is for". To list some of the names associated with his opera company reveals how that passion was allied to an acute perception of quality, either established or in the making. Sir Thomas Allen was president and Cara O'Sullivan, Mark Padmore, William Dazeley, Susan Gritton, Christopher Purves and Katerina Karnéus are now all international stars.

John was born in Bromley, Kent, and went to the Judd school in Tonbridge. After Hull University, he went on to Leeds for his MMus in opera studies where, for an examination, he was required to direct a scene from an opera, with piano accompaniment. Instead, John used his inspirational energy and persuasive charm to stage Mozart's Magic Flute in its entirety, with full chorus and orchestra.

In 1989 he took his first steps on to the professional stage, establishing the Opera Company and presenting Così Fan Tutte at the Trinity theatre, Tunbridge Wells, at £5 a seat. Its success was followed swiftly by Don Giovanni, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. By 1993 the company was touring a new production of Figaro with the Magic Flute directed by Clare Venables. Another tour in 1995 saw 160 singers and instrumentalists take Rigoletto and the Flute to the Hackney Empire, Richmond theatre, Hawth theatre, Crawley, Theatre Royal Brighton, the Edinburgh festival theatre, Tunbridge Wells Assembly Hall and Theatre Royal Bath.

The company folded despite full houses, recognition from the profession, support from local companies and gifts from individuals, because public funding failed him. As his father, Geoffrey, points out, "It is an irony of the arts in this country that when a company grows and becomes successful it becomes more and more expensive and less able to continue."

But John was never a man to dwell on disappointment and instead set about establishing small three vocal ensembles (Quorum, the Gregorian Singers and Quintus) while working first in music publishing and then latterly as arts and business manager at Tonbridge school. He took his singers to Chartres, Rouen, Reims, New York, Monterchi in Italy and Aragon in Spain, always keen to place music within its natural context.

In 2009, that same mission drew him to encourage Jon Oram to write and stage a huge community play entitled The Vanishing Elephant, which celebrated the rich and varied life of a single street in Tunbridge Wells, Camden Road. John's infectious enthusiasm for performing ensured that a large cast of local people discovered talents they didn't know they possessed. He maintained the cast's newfound pride, confidence and togetherness in a choir open to everyone called Create – now a living memorial to his own driving force.

He is survived by Geoffrey; his mother, Jill; his brother, Charles; and two nephews.

• Opera
• Classical music

Stephen Pritchard
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Park/Korzhev
(Toccata)

Now in his late 80s, the Anglo-Dutch composer Gerard Schurmann has lived in the US for the last 30 years.In that time his music has been heard less and less frequently in Britain, where he had previously had a successful career composing both for films and the concert hall, after studying with Alan Rawsthorne. It's 10 years since Chandos released a disc of Schurmann's Violin Concerto and Concerto for Orchestra, both finely worked pieces, vividly scored. This Toccata collection of works for violin and piano and piano alone, neatly played by Alyssa Park and Mikhail Korzhev, is a reminder of the craftsmanship that characterises Schurmann's music, and of his slightly brittle Stravinskyan style. Both the solo piano cycles, the theme and variations of Leotaurus and Contrasts, come from the mid-1970s, before Schurmann's move across the Atlantic, while the Duo, the biggest, most impressive score here, was the first thing he composed after he settled in Los Angeles, and Autumn Leaves dates from 2007.

Rating: 3/5

• Classical music

Andrew Clements
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Davislim/Martin/Hamer Quartet/Dauth/Benedict/Cantillation/Sydney SO/Wigglesworth
(Melba)

Arcadia Lost is the title of this collection of live recordings, in which Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem sits slightly oddly alongside three of Vaughan Williams' versions of the pastoral. Yet the excellence of all the performances is more than enough to set aside any questions about whether they belong together. Mark Wigglesworth's account of the Britten is a slow burner; he resists the temptation to turn it into a virtuoso showpiece for the fine Sydney orchestra from the start, but steadily ratchets up the intensity through the first movement and scherzo, leaving the finale to resolve its tensions. In The Lark Ascending, too, there's something purposeful rather than just decorative about the scene-painting; Michael Dauth is the solo violinist, while in the strange yet wonderfully sensuous Flos Campi, Roger Benedict plays the ruminating viola solo. The Housman settings of On Wenlock Edge are equally fresh and direct. Having Steve Davislim, an English-speaking tenor who isn't English, as soloist is a tremendous advantage that avoids any hint of preciousness and takes the cycle for what it is, a subtle and beautifully coloured 20th-century masterpiece.

Rating: 4/5

• Classical music

Andrew Clements
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Marcelo Bratke (Quartz)

Together with his 12 symphonies, the nine suites of Bachianas Brasileiras and the 14 pieces he called Choros provide the reference points in Villa-Lobos's huge and hugely variable output. The second disc in Marcelo Bratke's survey of Villa-Lobos's piano music includes the works from both series that he composed for the instrument. The Choros vary hugely in scale, from solos of just a few minutes to a work for piano and orchestra lasting over an hour. No 5 is one of the shortest, yet it's a perfect distillation of what Villa-Lobos assimilated from Brazilian popular music. Bratke plays it very winningly, as he does the similarly evocative pieces that make the Ciclo Brasileiro, with their exuberant piano writing that owes much to Ravel. But his account of the fourth Bachianas Brasileiras (a work that Villa-Lobos later orchestrated) is less convincing; its homage to Bach is just a bit too reverent, while its references to Brazil are rather underplayed.

Rating: 3/5

• Classical music

Andrew Clements
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Bavouzet/Lojendio/BBCPO/Mena
(Chandos)

Juanjo Mena made his debut on Chandos with the BBC Philharmonic last year in a distinctly unprepossessing collection of the music of Gabriel Pierné. The quality of the music on the orchestra's second disc with its recently installed chief conductor may be much higher, but the impression it all leaves is still unconvincing. Mena's account of Manuel de Falla's two-act ballet The Three-Cornered Hat comes with good Spanish credentials including a Spanish soprano, Raquel Lojendio for the two cante jondo songs, and members of the orchestra adding shouts and claps to the opening section. But somehow the performance seems to miss the point altogether; it lacks pungency, earthiness, and any real rhythmic energy. The account of Nights in the Gardens of Spain is better, mainly thanks to the solo piano playing of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whose iron-hand-in-a-velvet-glove approach is perfectly judged for a work that is about much more than decorative flourishes, but there is still something that is far too safe and neutral about the orchestral playing.

Rating: 3/5

• Classical music

Andrew Clements
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Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood holds Krzysztof Penderecki, Poland's foremost contemporary composer, in awe. And the feelings are very much mutual, the pair explain

It wasn't the most auspicious of meetings: "I shook his hand after a concert like a sad fan-boy." Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's creative catalyst, one of the world's great guitarists, and floppy-haired pin-up boy for the musically adventurous even in his early 40s, is talking about 78-year-old Polish classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki. For most of the musical world, it would be Greenwood who had the star quality rather than Poland's most eminent living composer – even if Penderecki did break creative barriers in the 1950s and 60s that are still rocking Greenwood's world. In fact, Greenwood's obsessive enthusiasm for Penderecki's music, especially his still radical early work, has brought the sounds of musical modernism to new audiences in ways Penderecki could only dream of.

Greenwood's fan-boyism has also resulted in a recent new work, 48 Responses to Polymorphia (the latter being Penderecki's 1961 composition), a new CD, and a live concert, in collaboration with Penderecki himself. But for all that to happen, this musical odd couple had to meet again. Greenwood travelled to Penderecki's home outside Krakow, with its hundreds of acres of arboretum, and this time, Penderecki knew who he was. Sort of. "I was trying hard not to be intimidated or overly starstruck," Greenwood says, "and he was trying very hard to put me at my ease, which made me even more anxious. I kind of wish he had been more foreboding, but he's just very friendly." Penderecki also had his preconceptions shattered. "I didn't expect to meet somebody from pop music who was really quite a normal person," Penderecki laughs. "He dresses very normal, he has dignity and very good manners." Had Penderecki heard any Radiohead? "I told my granddaughter, and she knew immediately who they were. She is 11, and she and my children gave me some discs to hear their music. I like it very much; it is very soft, very musical. And after that, I heard that Jonny was inspired by me in other pieces he has composed."

Since 2004, Greenwood has written for the London Sinfonietta, for the BBC Concert Orchestra, where he was composer in residence, and for the AUKSO Chamber Orchestra that tours to London later this month. And then there are his soundtracks. If you have seen Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, you have already become familiar with Greenwood – music from another of his Penderecki-inspired pieces, 2005's Popcorn Superhet Receiver, saturates his score for the movie.

Penderecki says that he has to thank Greenwood for introducing his music to a new generation of young people: when 48 Responses was premiered in Wroclaw last year, 9,000 young people packed the auditorium, "and they had never heard about this old guy Penderecki's music".

So what is it about Penderecki that Greenwood finds so inspiring? "His pieces make such wonderful sounds. And it is a beautiful experience to hear them live. Of all the composers whose music suffers from what recording does, Penderecki is one of the biggest casualties. I think a lot of people might think his work is stridently dissonant or painful on the ears. But because of the complexity of what's happening – particularly in pieces such as Threnody and Polymorphia, and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you're there. It's not like listening to feedback, and it's not dissonant. It's something else. It's a celebration of so many people making music together and it's like – wow, you're watching that happen."

That is what the real lesson of Greenwood's work with orchestras has been. "The big message has been that I have fallen out of love with recordings of orchestras. Despite what hi-fi magazines tell you about how much money you should spend on your speakers, you're not there, you're not in the hall. Because when you are really there, and you hear an orchestra start up, it's like nothing else. That richness filling the room, that's my motivation right now. I'm really hung up on avoiding speakers and electricity."

Hang on a minute – Jonny Greenwood, programmer extraordinaire, guitar-obsessive, new-sound junkie, wants to give up electricity and electronics? "I know I'm being massively hypocritical, because yes, I spend hours and hours programming computers trying to create these things, and I still love doing that. But I keep coming back to orchestras and thinking, that's amazing. And if you've got all those musicians in the room, why would you want a laptop, or want it all coming out of speakers?"

There are ironies on ironies here. Penderecki's Polymorphia, composed in 1961, couldn't have been written without the Polish composer's experience of early electronics studios. And some of the detail of the piece is based on something that seems straight out of a sci-fi movie: Penderecki wired up psychiatric patients to encephalogram machines and played them an earlier piece of his, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and then translated the graphs of their brain-waves as they reacted to the music into the textures of Polymorphia. Greenwood has his own lo-fi homage to that idea in his 48 Responses. Partly also in tribute to Penderecki's love of trees, Greenwood found an oak leaf in his garden, and transformed the contours of its veins and sinews into musical material. Fake Plastic Trees no more … "I hope he sees it as a gesture of affection," he says, "but it might be one of those things that looks better on paper. I only let that part play for about 30 seconds of the 20-minute piece."

Greenwood admits, "there is something retro about what I'm doing, but I also think there's something that is still exciting and relevant in writing for orchestras. It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the 60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it's feels more modern to me. And that's why Penderecki's early music, and the whole thing of writing for orchestras, still feels very modern. If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing."

Jonny Greenwood, saviour of the orchestra – why not?

All of this has an impact on Radiohead, too, with Greenwood's ceaseless quest to make the band's sonic palette as flexible as any orchestra. They are about to tour the US, which is the best time Greenwood finds to write his film scores and orchestral music, "instead of doing something healthy such as going to the gym or seeing exciting people. It's the perfect situation to work." He shows me a music notebook he's been filling with sketches for the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie he is scoring. "I've sort of learned grownup music handwriting. I used to colour in crotchets with my tongue out" – he mimes a pose of schoolboyish concentration – "but a few years ago I finally sped up."

But Greenwood doesn't need any false modesty when it comes to his classical pieces. His 48 Responses isn't just a good piece for a composer who is more used to the studio, it is a dazzlingly imaginative, gripping and novel work, full stop. Don't just take my word for it: Penderecki thinks so too: "None of what Jonny does is a copy of what I have done. Even his notation is different from mine. He does things that I haven't done, and has gone in a different direction using some elements of my music. He is very gifted. I like his music very much." Who's the fan-boy now?

Jonny Greenwood's album with Krzysztof Penderecki is released on Nonesuch on 12 March. Penderecki conducts his pieces from the album with the AUSKO Chamber Orchestra, and Marek Moś conducts Greenwood's works as part of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival at the Barbican, London on 22 March.

• Classical music
• Radiohead

Tom Service
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