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Martyn Brabbins and Claire Booth are among the Nash Ensemble's regular collaborators celebrating the group’s 60th Anniversary, marked by four world premieres.

John Casken's intriguing new work for trombone and orchestra presents a musical interpretation of a Michelangelo drawing, along with superb Mozart and powerful Prokofiev. 

A superb concert from the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder included John Casken's 2014 oboe concerto Apollinaire's Bird, a rare piece by Elgar and Vaughan Williams' powerful Fourth Symphony. 

Hall One of Sage Gateshead was packed for a characteristic Thomas Zehetmair programme, with Mozart, Bartók, a world première and a trademark Beethoven symphony to mark the end of his tenure as musical director of Royal Northern Sinfonia.

Stéphane Rancourt gives the world première of John Casken's Apollinaire's Bird alongside brilliant Shostakovich and Weill. 

Composer John Casken presents two of his own pieces, and works by his friends and mentors Toru Takemitsu and Witold Lutosławski in a Royal Northern Sinfonia Late Mix concert at Sage Gateshead.

A disappointing performance of motets by Bach and Bruckner is rescued by an imaginative and evocative new work by John Casken, performed by Chorus of Royal Northern Sinfonia and flautist Juliette Bausor.

Counterpoise offered a tasteful and well-crafted concert at Kings Place on Sunday of recent works accompanied by film and still photographs. The unusual instrumentation of the ensemble (violin, saxophone, trumpet, piano) was surprisingly effective. Works for smaller subsets of the ensemble gave individual performers a chance to shine as well.

The medieval garden was an enchanted place, a place where the beauties of nature took on formal and symbolic qualities, and the perfect setting for the coded artifice of courtly love.