Gavin Plumley surveys Shostakovich’s wartime ‘Leningrad’ symphony

Michael Church picks this years must-hear classical

Written on Skin (Royal Opera House)

Amid 11 hours of cathedral rehearsals and five services a week, the conventional education rolls along as normal at Chetham's School of Music. Still, it takes a special kind of dedication to be a chorister – and, as Ian Herbert has discovered, a chorister's parent

Thirteen composers won awards last week. All were male. Jessica Duchen is furious

The German composer was a confirmed anti-Semite – but that didn't deter our correspondent, who loves his music, from wanting to write a play to celebrate his bicentenary

"Filth for filth's sake," fulminated the Royal Albert Hall in 1971, when cancelling its sold-out premiere at just three days' notice. "Have I got to listen to this?" bleated the judge when the song "Penis Dimension" was played in court during the subsequent breach-of-contract suit, and his pro-RAH verdict was as good as delivered.

As his centenary year reaches a climax, Claudia Pritchard hails the composer

Iain Banks' cult novel is the unlikely source for a new show at Covent Garden

The American composer is a co-founder of the LA Dance Project, which makes its London debut at Sadler’s Wells this week. His opera Two Boys also opens next month at the Met in New York. He tells Charlotte Cripps  about his current reading, watching and listening ...

Mahler's Symphony No 8 – the Symphony of a Thousand, with its 850-strong choir – premiered in Munich. Previous works had been met with indifference, but this time the Austrian composer received a 20-minute standing ovation

There are more women conductors than recent media stories imply – they just don't get the top jobs

o farewell to another Proms season, with its pleasures and surprises, longueurs and banalities. Moments I will long remember: blind pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii making something rich and luminous out of Rach Two, Ex Cathedra debating love in a babel of unknown tongues, the Tallis Scholars delivering transcendent a cappella polyphony, Nigel Kennedy (pictured) orientalising Vivaldi with the Palestine Strings. Most of these were Late Proms. There's a magic in the Royal Albert Hall when the streets outside go quiet and minds are sharpened.

The bass-baritone, recently in Salt Lake City to sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, was visited at home in Wales by missionaries who tried to convert him

Nessun Dorma's appeal extends far beyond opera, says Jessica Duchen