Venus and the Violin: Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Huw Watkins at Kings Place

In a concert of three violin sonatas, a disappointing Debussy precedes an interesting piece by Watkins and well-performed Beethoven.

Oliver Knussen and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group excel in a cunningly linked group of works from the old (mid 1980s) to the brand new.

A superb lunch time concert by the Britten Sinfonia players which included outstanding performances of works by Debussy, Fauré and a newly commissioned work titled "Light and Matter” by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. 

Barbican Britten: Phaedra is just one of the events in the venue’s two-week celebration of the composer’s centenary. The programme presents four pieces choreographed by Richard Alston to Benjamin Britten’s music. Alston’s choreography is well suited to Britten’s music: both artists are lyrical, tempered, and incline toward narrative.

Anyone who worries for the health of contemporary composition obviously wasn’t at the Southbank Centre this Sunday, where the London Sinfonietta presented a whole afternoon and evening’s worth of new music in and around the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

This month the BBC’s Total Immersion series celebrated the 60th birthday of British composer Oliver Knussen. A sensitively devised programme given at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on Sunday featured five works composed between the 1970s and the 1990s.