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Stretching minds and musicians in Manchester Collective’s night of strings and electronics.

John Woolrich's Songbook project provided the vocal material on show at the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group recital at Wigmore Hall, featuring sopranos Gillian Keith and Rebecca von Lipinski.

Red Note Ensemble's Sounding Brass in a unique afternoon of brass, percussion and electronics in an imaginatively scouted industrial setting.

The magical potential of electroacoustic music was on display Thursday evening in the cavernous, dilapidated pier that is Fort Mason’s Herbst Pavilion in San Francisco.

Miraculous as Jonathan Harvey’s music is, it seems reductive to call Wagner Dream an opera. Half the cast, after all, don’t even sing, but act: it’s a sincere meeting of music and theatre in a way that opera usually isn’t.

There was no doubt that for this concert, one had to enter the front door with a completely open mind. The aim of the Contemporary Music Venture is to promote contemporary music to a wider audience, in an hour and for free – an honourable challenge.This was set to be their first concert of the year.

The late composer Jonathan Harvey, who died last month at age 73, described his Speakings (2008) as the most complicated and ambitious work he had ever written. A 25-minute composition for orchestra and electronics, the piece certainly warrants that description on the levels of scale and logistics alone.

To judge by the continued chatter, no-one noticed 100 metronomes on stage being set in motion, signalling the beginning of György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (1962). Even when the lights were dimmed it only dawned on people slowly that the concert had actually already begun.

Contemporary classical music is happening in all manner of unexpected venues in London at the moment, from Peckham car parks to pubs. But it isn't just getting edgier – it's also getting more respectable, if last night's suave affair in the Royal Albert Hall's Elgar Room is anything to go by.

In most concert listings, premières seem to be thrown in as a one-off to offset a relatively risk-free billing. In this Cheltenham Music Festival concert, this was not the case. With no less than five premières in an evening of seven choral works, those present could be assured that they were hearing something new.

The Ensemble Resonanz is a Hamburg-based contemporary chamber orchestra committed to finding bridges to modernism amid works from centuries past, and to that end this concert featured Helmut Lachenmann set alongside Mozart, and Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles rescored by Manuel Hidalgo.

‘Madonna’ and ‘synthesizer’ are two words which seldom go together in a classical-music context, but Jonathan Harvey defies our expectations with delight.

British composer, Jonathan Harvey, could be described as the embodiment of this year's Edinburgh International Festival theme - Europe meets Asia. His spiritual journey, from Christianity via Steinerism to Vajrayana Buddhism, is reflected in his compositional path.