Farsighted champion of music and theatre

High-quality work in the performing arts frequently depends on a combination of private enterprise and public support. But the need for a dynamically entrepreneurial approach remains a constant, and that is what Jack Phipps, who has died aged 84, brought to classical music and the theatrical world.

Born in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, where his father was a tobacco farmer, Jack was educated in Johannesburg and spent a term at Harrow school, north-west London. At Merton College, Oxford, he took a degree in history, but music was his guiding passion and he gained early professional experience with Ian Hunter, director of the artist management firm Harold Holt. There, he was closely involved with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the conductors Colin Davis and Bernard Haitink, and the conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim.

In 1962 Jack was a prime mover in the setting up and running of the City of London festival, reviving the area's cultural life. In 1965 he and his second wife, Sue (Pears), whom he had married the previous year, established their own management agency, looking after Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, Sue's uncle, and other singers, including Pilar Lorengar, Jessye Norman and Jill Gomez.

In 1970 Jack was asked to help reorganise the Dramatic and Lyric Theatres Association national touring scheme. This turned into the touring department of what was then the Arts Council of Great Britain. When the Moss Empires and Howard and Wyndham theatre circuits started to break up in the late 1970s, Jack helped secure the future of these venues. He persuaded the Arts Council to work with commercial producers to get first-class work into these theatres and secured support for the touring musicals produced by the young Cameron Mackintosh.

He worked hard to establish English National Opera North (subsequently Opera North) in 1977 and the Royal Shakespeare Company's regular seasons in Newcastle upon Tyne, as well as its annual tour that took Shakespeare into leisure centres in towns with no theatre. Other projects included Opera 80, later English Touring Opera, and the move of Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet to become Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Under Jack's leadership, Arts Council Touring became an enterprising force, supporting small-scale and experimental work and investing in marketing and audience development. He had an uncanny knack for spotting gaps in the market and talent, and was an early champion of Nicholas Hytner, now director of the National Theatre.

From 1979 to 1981, Jack was responsible for the enlarged regional department, and then he became general manager of the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk. This had been the creation of Britten and Pears, but the composer died in 1976, and the tenor stopped singing four years later. Jack's move there did not work out, and 18 months later he moved to Bath to work at the Theatre Royal, returning to the Arts Council in 1986.

In 1992 he was appointed CBE, and retired that year to Alderton, Suffolk. There Jack indulged his passion for opera by mounting a number of modest but notable productions in his local church. In 2001 it became evident that Jack was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He is survived by Sue, by their son Martin, and by his children, Polly and Simon, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.

? John "Jack" Richard Noel Phipps, born 24 December 1925; died 5 August 2010

Royal Albert Hall, London

Composer Simon Jeffes (1949-97) was one of the great individuals of the past century, as idiosyncratically English as Cornelius Cardew, Gustav Holst and the Beatles. Recording and touring with his evolving collective the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, he made world music from an alternate universe, composing jingles, folk tunes and even a ballet.

This late-night Prom brought Jeffes's work to life once more courtesy of the second-generation Penguin Cafe, a new band led by his son Arthur. The pieces are easy on the ear, but tricky to play well ? as the first Covent Garden performances of his ballet, 'Still Life' at the Penguin Cafe, proved. Jeffes the younger has happily assembled a young band with a mix of personalities and skills similar to the original PCO: they play like friends. The ensemble expertly negotiated the asymmetric patterns of Perpetuum Mobile as if they were nursery rhymes, while From the Colonies and Dirt retained the slight sourness and louche swing of the originals. Arthur played the loop from Telephone and Rubber Band "from a modern telephone" ? an iPhone perched on his piano.

Special guest Kathryn Tickell played the Northumbrian pipes part she contributed to the original PCO recording of Organum, and brought a moving opening passage to Arthur's new composition Bramble May. Tickell also augmented the band on fiddle for Swing the Cat and Salty Bean Fumble, giving the ensemble a ceilidh-like exuberance.

The more eccentric, experimental aspects of Simon Jeffes's oeuvre were missing from the repertoire, and the pace flagged a couple of times, but for the most part Penguin Cafe proved how well his music has survived in the new century. The deceptively simple Paul's Dance, for cuatro and ukelele, was a charming triumph ? a courtly dance from a kingdom of the imagination.

Rating: 4/5

Royal Albert Hall, London

A little programme note can be a dangerous thing. Tansy Davies's new work, Wild Card, is a 20-minute orchestral traversal through the tarot deck and the "Fool's journey" it depicts. In her note, Davies professes her fascination with the "game-like" nature of the tarot and lists the musical motifs she has assigned to the 22 main cards. It is as if she is challenging us to her own game: divine a story from the musical flashcards, and so tell our fortune in her music.

It's not as simple as that, though, and no surprise there. The motifs are as much a matter of texture as instrumentation or shape, and some are so elusive that one half suspects Davies might be taking us all for fools. The Devil's stuttering dance pattern, on low winds punctuated by an itchy rattle, opens the work and provides one of its most distinctive ideas, as well as introducing the kind of misaligned rhythmic patterns in which Davies delights. Temperance and the Star together bring swirls from harp and vibraphone; the Sun sweeps all before it with a wind machine.

Skilfully sparing with her use of a large orchestra, Davies creates an intriguing soundworld that never rests for long. Still, the episodic structure comes to feel a little like a limitation: ultimately the cards, however brightly coloured, are the same shape and size. Under Ji?í B?lohlávek the BBC Symphony Orchestra provided a decent premiere performance, without quite the confidence or swing to live up to Davies's promise of "ecstatic interjections" and "grinding grooves".

Having opened by breezing through the Prelude to the third act of Lohengrin, the orchestra returned to German Romanticism in the second half with Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. B?lohlávek created an unflagging sense of lyrical ebb and flow, and if at times the orchestra could have shown more teeth, it was still on good all-round form.

Rating: 3/5

The Mercury music prize combines star power and industry credibility ? isn't it time that classical music had something similar?

I return to the blogosphere to find there's another debate on concert etiquette going on, triggered by the nation's favourite grey-haired electronica maestro, Jonathan Harvey ? I agree with commenter MVMountwood, who said he wished that Harvey's music "routinely attracted as much media attention" as his comments on classical music culture ? and to see that Mark-Anthony Turnage has ripped off Beyoncé at the Proms. And also to find that minimalist indie band the xx have walked away with this year's Mercury music prize.

These events prompted the following thoughts, in no particular order. Firstly, that classical music still lacks any award ceremony to match the combination of media impact and artistic seriousness of the Mercurys or the Turner prize (and no, the Classical Brits and their record-industry back-slapping don't count). The nearest we have are the venerable Royal Philharmonic Society awards and the PRS new music award.

The PRS gong ought to be the real Turner equivalent. The winner, announced on the 16 September, gets £50,000 for a new piece of music ? more than twice as much as the Mercury victors will get, and double the amount Britain's most prestigious art prize nets its winner. The difference with the PRS award is that the cash goes on producing the composers's ideas, not straight into their bank account in honour of work they've already done. In previous years, this has meant digging a big hole for Jem Finer's Score for a Hole in the Ground, and creating a nationwide virtual instrument for The Fragmented Orchestra.

Collectively, however, the vision of "new music" the PRS advocates on its shortlist is just plain weird: a range of inoffensive, mostly genreless sound-art and new-instrument ideas that will upset no one, that ticks boxes marked "politically correct" and "innovative", but that will sadly end up making as much difference to the media and musical culture as a wet sock on laundry day.

I hope I'm proved wrong, but is this really the best use of the nation's most generous financial award for new music? How about giving the money for a piece the PRS can actually collect royalties from: a new orchestral work that uses live electronics, or an album that puts a cutting-edge classical composer alongside a studio artist (to pick only two of many ideas that might stand a better chance of pricking the public consciousness)?

Thought number two, regarding concert etiquette. Here's Hector Berlioz writing about going to the opera in Paris in the mid-1820s:

As I was intimately acquainted with every note of the score, the performers, if they were wise, played it as it was written; I would have died rather than allow the slightest liberty with the old masters to pass unnoticed. I had not notion of biding my time and coldly protesting in writing against such a crime ? oh dear, no! ? I apostrophised the delinquents then and there in my loudest voice, and I can testify than no form of criticism goes so straight home as that ... Accordingly, when the Scythian ballet [in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride] began I lay in wait for my cymbals ... Boiling with anger ... I shouted out with all my might, "There are no cymbals there; who has dared to correct Gluck?" ... But it was worse in the third act, where the trombones in Orestes' monologue were suppressed, just as I feared they would be; and the same voice was heard shouting out, "Not a sign of a trombone; it is intolerable!"

I have long wanted to try this at concerts when a conductor, orchestra, or singer is up there massacring one of my favourite pieces, but have so far lacked the courage of my convictions. Until now. Let's bring back Berlioz's instant feedback system at concerts. Jonathan Harvey would surely agree with me.

And so to the final item on the agenda: the Turnage-Beyoncé stooshie. It would all surely have mattered more if the new piece weren't so unimaginative in what it did with its material, whatever its provenance. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

Royal Albert Hall, London

After 15 years restoring London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to artistic health, Daniele Gatti became music director of France's national band at the end of 2008. On the strength of his first Prom with the orchestra, his approach has been similar: break them down and build them back up. Their sound is virtually unrecognisable, characterised by a much firmer attack and more strident tone, and the Italian's approach to the familiar scores that made up this concert ? Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un Faune, La Mer and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ? was anything but business as usual.

The Debussy scores were taken slowly, with some wonderful blending in a woodwind section at the top of its game, but without loss of rhythmic drive. The result was a remarkable flexibility in which even the most languorous of lines or extended arabesques were never heard to lose their lilt. The Prélude sounded like a dance for once, while the cross-currents in La Mer had all the power but none of the blind indifference of their equivalents in nature.

The Stravinsky was, if anything, taken faster than usual, but with the same emphasis on rhythmic flexibility. The results were eye-popping, less because of the speed than the absence of the sense one often gets with this work of it being some kind of macabre dance for automata. Gatti's movement had an entirely human feel, the languid sensuality of the concert's first half crescendoing to a lithe and highly charged sexuality in the second.

Such experimentation is never without risk, and Gatti, conducting from memory, lost his way at the end of the Procession of the Sage, leaving the brass section fumbling for a moment. But he soon had them back on top for Part II.

Rating: 4/5

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When composer Michael Berkeley lost his hearing, he finally understood Beethoven's torment. But could deafness help him write better music?

The increasing deafness that Beethoven suffered during the closing years of his life gives the masterpieces that he wrote in that period, like the late String Quartets, a mystical aura, especially for the layman ? for whom the art of composing is in itself akin to an act of magic.

To a composer, however, the fact that Beethoven was able to "write in his head", and get the music straight from there on to paper, is actually not so surprising. Anyone who has been through rigorous training in composition will have been encouraged ? not to say directed ? to write music away from the piano in order to realise pure sound on paper, free from the meandering route that improvising fingers travel.

This is not to decry the use of an instrument. Stravinsky liked a neutral sound to come back at him when he was composing. Just about any old piano would do: in fact, he put a blanket inside the upright he worked on in Paris. One look at his early scores reveals the telltale imprint of harmony heard through the fingers of two hands. Indeed, his groundbreaking masterpiece, The Rite of Spring, is episodic rather than argued: that is, it does not have the organic growth you tend to find in music conceived and sculpted purely in the mind, as exemplified by Beethoven.

Beethoven and Stravinsky were considered aurally cacophonous in their day. At the premiere of the Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, the crowd booed while Nijinsky, in the wings, frantically called out the beats so that Dhiagilev's dancers could follow the music. Paradoxically, both composers share a profound understanding of confusion, in its best and most exhilarating musical sense: initially causing discomfort through calculated dissonance. With hearing loss, however, the distortion created is arbitrary and destructive, rather than provocative.

It is easy to imagine that the enforced inner world where Beethoven found himself endowed him with an additional sense of vision ? that being locked into his own aural bubble concentrated his ideas to an almost combustible degree of potency. We can never know for sure, just as we can never know the true cause of his loss of hearing (rather than a clear diagnosis, his autopsy revealed various elements of damage, including a narrowing of the Eustachian tube). But what I now appreciate all too clearly, for similar but hopefully temporary reasons, is the pounding frustration of not being able to try something out on the piano, of not being able to go near a concert because of the terrible cacophony that would assail me ? because I, too, have developed a hearing problem.

Beethoven was reluctant to speak of his loss of hearing, but in the heart-rending Heiligenstadt Testament that he wrote to his brothers, which was only found after his death, he bared his deaf soul and described the frustration not only of musical isolation but, perhaps more vitally, social isolation: "Oh, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense, which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed to near perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed. Oh, I cannot do it; therefore forgive me when you see me draw back, when I would have gladly mingled with you."

The growing silence Beethoven experienced is hard for those who can hear to imagine: no change of atmosphere as you move from room to room, no rustle of paper; a dead world of aural nothingness. Yet it was in this state that he composed the loud and triumphant Ninth Symphony. At its premiere in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven could hear neither the music nor the applause, and wept openly.

I had often wondered what it must be like for a composer to find music inaudible and even unbearable. I have now looked, for the last few weeks, into that abyss. A respiratory infection led one night to the sounds of an orgy of diabolical plumbing in my right ear. Sudden pain was accompanied by frenetic gurgling, bubbling and popping that never seemed to give that final gratifying lurch into free, equalised air. Next morning, I could hear nothing on that side. This would have been merely an inconvenience were it not for the fact that I already have severe hearing loss in my left ear, thanks to a mastoid operation in childhood, compounded by exposure to ridiculously loud rock music as a young keyboard player.

Following one of these infections, the Eustachian tube becomes inflamed and blocked. Furthermore, fluid in the middle ear prevents those tiny little bones, like the stirrup, from vibrating and thus conveying sound. GPs tend to be confident that, within a few months, the middle ear clears, and hearing returns; and, where Beethoven had a primitive ear trumpet, audiologists can now offer sophisticated hearing aids.

Clearly, Beethoven had a more hopeless affliction ? possibly nerve damage and certainly roaring tinnitus ? but his reported descriptions of distortion and frequency loss now sound horribly familiar to me. Beethoven could, and did, read other composers' work, and it would have come as vividly off the page for him as does reading a novel for others. It is possible, too, that his late, great music is exactly what he would have produced regardless of the state of his hearing.

But music is about experiencing the live and the tactile: the hit of bow against string, of being able to compare interpretations. Playing in public became completely impossible for Beethoven following his disastrous, and deeply distressing, performance of his Fifth Piano Concerto, The Emperor, in 1811. Did his piano sound, as mine does, out of tune, as though it had been prepared by John Cage to defy all previous perceptions of what a piano should sound like? Were a whole set of frequencies removed? If he were to play one of his sonatas, would one hand sound as though it were playing in a different key to the other? And did one ear hear sound a major third higher than the other? Did a simple scale suddenly leap in the middle so that natural order was convoluted and distorted?

Then we come to that apparent contradiction in terms, hyperacusis, where loud and therefore audible noises, like drums, instead of being welcome are truly painful. I had to leave the Royal Albert Hall halfway through a Prom because the strings sounded like dry percussion, the high woodwind screamed, and brass and tympani boomed painfully. "Good thing you are not writing the review," said a critic friend as I fled. Such aural horrors would prompt turbulence and despair in most musicians ? and the lonely Beethoven, no stranger to either emotion, contemplated suicide. "How sad is my lot, I must avoid all things that are dear to me," he wrote.

At the moment, I cling to the view that my condition will improve. There has been an increase in volume, particularly with speech, but not so much in the hearing of music ? which continues to sound ugly and disparate. Catching a piano piece on the radio the other day I asked: "What on earth is this? It sounds like Ligeti crossed with Nancarrow." It turned out to be Schumann. Were I to be facing a lifetime of this, I would be in despair. It would mean that I could never again hear great music, let alone my own works. In terms of composition, it has meant that I have concentrated on simple things I know I can hear accurately: an elegy for unaccompanied cello, for instance, and an anthem for Liverpool Cathedral. It's not so much the act of composition that is nullified, but the fact that one's confidence is fractured by not being able to try out what it is you hear in your head. On the other hand, I wrote a large chunk of my Clarinet Concerto, an expressionistic piece I particularly like, in a hotel room in Minnesota some years ago, so I know it can be done. In fact, it's probably good for the technique: to be forced absolutely and utterly into your own private and insular acoustic.

The loss of proper, external musical sensation does heighten my sense of what Beethoven arrived at in those late String Quartets, living entirely for an inner world and creating within it an edifice in which you tend to wrestle away the superficial and the unnecessary. Ideas are stripped down to their essence and the intensity of your involvement becomes ever more personal and passionate. The drama is turned inward, almost alarmingly so.

Contemplating afresh Beethoven's sheer willpower and sublime creativity as his hearing deserted him, and listening again to the defiant Grosse Fuge and the haunting Cavatina from the Opus 130 Quartet that he himself did not live to witness in its final form, I find myself reconsidering Beethoven's extraordinary achievement. It brings tears to the eyes ? eyes, which for Beethoven, became his ears.

Inspirational artistic director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Roderick Brydon, who has died aged 71, was a leading figure in Scottish music-making and a conductor with an international reputation for more than a quarter of a century. As the first artistic director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO), he laid the foundations for the ensemble that were to stand it in good stead in the decades to come. His association with the Scottish National Orchestra and with Scottish Opera, for whom he conducted more than 20 productions over a period of 25 years, also consolidated his position. But, having been passed over for the conductorship of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in the early 1980s, he began to work more frequently abroad, making an impact particularly in the opera houses of Switzerland and Australia, but still appearing from time to time in his native Scotland until incapacitated by ill health in recent years.

Born in Edinburgh, he was educated at Daniel Stewart's college there, studying thereafter at Edinburgh University and in Vienna and Siena (where his teachers included Sergiu Celibidache). From 1963 to 1969 he was a staff conductor at Sadler's Wells Opera, with which he made his debut in Verdi's Attila (1964). In 1965, he became associate conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra ? an ensemble (from 1991 the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) he was to conduct throughout his life ? and in the same year he also made his debut with Scottish Opera in Madama Butterfly.

As founder of the SCO in 1975, Brydon inaugurated a vehicle intended to bring small-scale classical music, not least contemporary works, to the whole of Scotland. Touring throughout the country, including the Highlands and Islands, the SCO also has an international profile continued by its later principal conductors, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Ivor Bolton, Joseph Swensen and Robin Ticciati. With Charles Mackerras, who was conductor laureate until his recent death, the ensemble made prizewinning recordings of Mozart symphonies. It was Brydon's vision that set all this in train, and he continued in the post of artistic director until 1983.

His chief posts overseas in subsequent years were as general music director at Lucerne Opera (1984?87), where he conducted such works as Carmen, Don Giovanni, Albert Herring and Fidelio, and musical director at Berne Opera (1988?90), where he tackled A Village Romeo and Juliet, Capriccio, Peter Grimes and Parsifal. In these years he also undertook guest engagements in Hanover, Copenhagen, Karlsruhe, Bordeaux, Geneva and Venice.

A new phase of his career began in 1991 when he made his Australian debut conducting Madama Butterfly for Victoria State Opera, an engagement that led to further work on that continent, including a Lucia di Lammermoor in Sydney in 1996. The highlight of those years was undoubtedly Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Baz Luhrmann's sensational production, brought from Sydney to the Edinburgh International Festival in 1994. Luhrmann relocated the action to India under the British Raj and filled the stage area with an enormous bandstand. The members of the SCO were dressed as military bandsmen and were conducted by Brydon sporting a military moustache. Not only did he succeed in ? appropriately enough ? maintaining musical discipline, but he brought commendable refinement also to the more poetic passages of the score.

In fact, Britten was a composer with whom Brydon had long established a rapport. In 1966, he had championed Albert Herring both at home and abroad. In Geneva, he had conducted a highly praised Turn of the Screw in 1981 and a powerful Billy Budd in 1994. A gripping Rape of Lucretia and a fine Death in Venice, brought to Edinburgh from Geneva, were also among his achievements.

The qualities for which Brydon was most highly regarded were the tautness of his rhythm, his unobtrusive musicality and the support he gave his singers. On the concert platform he was valued for his espousal of the work of Scottish composers: he gave the world premiere of Iain Hamilton's Third Symphony at the BBC Proms in 1982.

For the past few years he had lived in Scotland, to be close to friends and family. He is survived by his wife, Pamela, and their son and daughter.

? Roderick Brydon, conductor, born 8 Jan 1939; died 23 June 2010

Royal Albert Hall, London

Stéphane Denève's Prom with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra brought Paul Lewis's Beethoven cycle to a close with a performance of the Emperor Concerto that didn't always scale the requisite heights. Their interpretation was primarily hampered by disparities of approach and unequal concepts of grandeur.

Lewis's response to the vehemence with which Denève flung out the first chord was a flourish of restrained, rather stiff nobility. Thereafter, Lewis's rigour sat uneasily with Denève's flamboyance. Lewis's playing was direct and unfussy, but short on poetry, even in the slow movement, while Denève's high Romantic gestures were, on occasion, as hectoring as they were magnificent.

Denève's showmanship dominated the rest of it. The ritzy opening performance of Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture was balanced at the end by an equally glamorous rendition of Respighi's Pines of Rome. And the mixture of Berg, Britten and ceilidh band that informs the Three Interludes from James MacMillan's opera The Sacrifice brought out the best in the RSNO's superb woodwind and brass.

The real treat, however, came with the late-night Prom, in which the charismatic Corsican conductor-violinist Jean-Christophe Spinosi and his wonderful Ensemble Matheus were joined by Philippe Jaroussky and Marie-Nicole Lemieux for a programme of arias and concertos by Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel and Porpora. With an exceptional ability to communicate the joy he takes in making music, Spinosi seems to dance and whirl in front of his players, rather than simply conduct them. Jaroussky and Lemieux, meanwhile, sang with virtuosic ease and sensual abandon. A classy, sexy entertainment, and pure pleasure from start to finish.

The Proms continue until 11 September. Details: bbc.co.uk/proms

Rating: 4/5

Theatr Hafren, Newtown

Before a light goes on or a note is heard in Mid-Wales Opera's new production, resonant snoring establishes that ? whatever he believes ? Sir John Falstaff's attractions as a bedfellow are nil. This gets a laugh and sets the tenor of Martin Lloyd-Evans's jolly but observant production. There aren't that many belly laughs, though, partly because Charles Johnston, as Falstaff, doesn't sport the customary voluminous prosthetic. In fact, his rotund stomach is created before our eyes: having helped Falstaff consume an enormous lunch, Pistol and Bardulph pack away the giant tablecloth by stuffing it under his shirt. This moment typifies the company's inventive approach to cost-cutting.

Lloyd-Evans sets Verdi's comedy in the present day, with Ford in blazer and slacks, and Pistol as a slicked-back teddy boy. As befits Verdi and Boïto's take on The Merry Wives of Windsor, it's the women's machinations against Falstaff and Ford, the determination to prick their pomposity, that entertain. Lee Bisset's Alice sounds more comfortable than she looks (she's wearing a puffball-skirted dress, a pun on Falstaff's traditional pumpkin breeches), while Gaynor Keeble's Mistress Quickly is a rich-toned caricature.

Borrowing the puppetry that's usually the trademark of the director Richard Jones, the final scene at Herne's oak has ghouls and spirits as well as a wedding-cake tableau, lending a final element of spectacle to an otherwise necessarily thin, pack-in-a-van concept. In his debut as MWO's artistic director, Nicholas Cleobury ensures a lively pace throughout, with Johnston's Falstaff and Wyn Pencarreg's Ford vividly characterised and making the most of Amanda Holden's witty translation.

Rating: 3/5

Royal Albert Hall, London

This was a day that focused on Henry Wood, the artistic founder and virtually sole conductor of the Proms for nearly 50 years, and these two concerts paid tribute to him. Wood was famed for his hard work and versatility, as well as his determined advocacy of a huge range of new music.

Almost every item in the evening's Prom, delivered by the Ulster Orchestra under Paul Watkins, was either premiered or introduced to the UK by Wood. Among the rarities revived, Bax's London Pageant possessed a definition and sweep that brings it within reach of better known marches by Elgar and Walton. Dorothy Howell's 1919 tone-poem Lamia revealed a sensitive ear for sonority, even if the material itself had less memorability than its models in Franck, Debussy and Scriabin. Parry's Symphonic Variations seemed a dull collection compared to their obvious Brahmsian inspiration.

Watkins had more enticing material to work on in Rachmaninov's First Piano Concerto, with Steven Osborne the sparky soloist, as well as in a lively account of Sibelius's Karelia Suite and the Waltz and Polonaise from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, although these needed to dance more. But Watkins's command was never in doubt, and he drew playing of warmth and depth from his musicians.

The earlier Prom, a replay of the Last Night of the 1910 season, seemed nigh-on interminable, with 11 short pieces in the first half alone. Steven Isserlis dug deep into his cello for David Matthews's new and touching Dark Pastoral, the sole departure from the 1910 programme, based on Vaughan Williams's sketches for a never-written concerto. Vocal soloists Jennifer Larmore and Sergei Leiferkus were memorable, although the latter was indecipherable in Edward German's The Yeomen of England. Paul Daniel and the BBC Concert Orchestra had a distinctly mixed afternoon.

Rating: 3/5

Royal Albert Hall, London

The Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle were the hottest orchestral ticket of this summer's Proms, and for at least three-quarters of their two programmes, they sounded as if they fully deserved to be.

Friday night's two symphonies, Beethoven's Fourth and Mahler's First, started in strikingly similar fashion: a sustained unity, with a melodic line stepping tentatively down. A new listener would have had no idea what was next, and that is how Rattle seemed to want us all to listen, rookies and veterans alike. Both performances brought a searching quality to the fore, making sense of Rattle's unhurried tempos.

Even while the Beethoven sailed on the breeze of the orchestra's crisp precision, the players seemed in the most exploratory passages of the first movement to be genuinely trying out new keys for size, rather than merely following the notes on the page. In the Mahler, the genial first main melody emerged slightly wistfully, as if it were already a memory, setting the tone for a performance in which the patches of shade were darker and more distant than usual ? but the moments of true light burned brighter as a result, undimmed by the occasional tiny brass glitch. Some hear a hollowness in the triumph at the close of this symphony, especially in the context of the composer's weightier work to come. Here, the victory might have been temporary ? but hollow? Never.

The weaker spots came in the first half of Saturday's concert, when Rattle's spaciousness verged on just plain slow. Wagner's Parsifal overture showcased some fantastically blended woodwind, but the first theme was made sluggish by a slight lag between instruments, and the music never quite hit its sublime stride. Similarly, Rattle took Strauss's Four Last Songs so broadly that the soprano Karita Mattila was pushed to the limits of her lungs, and even in her most radiant moments seemed always to be holding something back.

The second half, however, was a return to form. Asking us to listen to them as if they were "Mahler's imaginary Eleventh Symphony", Rattle segued three sets of orchestral pieces by the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg's Op 16, Webern's Op 6 and Berg's Op 6. It was quite possible to buy the idea of the Schoenberg pieces making up a kind of opening movement, with the Webern the pensive, tense interlude, and the Berg the climactic, more rhythmically driven finale. Each work gained much from the loving, sonorous care of the playing, but perhaps even more from the context of the works around it: together, they combined into a newly lush sonic experience.

Rating: 5/5

Professor of music pushes 'blasphemous' idea of concerts where people can talk or walk out in middle of a movement

One of Britain's leading composers is calling on fellow classical musicians to abandon the stuffy conventions that surround the concert hall and to adopt new and "blasphemous" ideas, such as amplifying the sound.

Jonathan Harvey, whose piece Dum transisset sabbatum was featured in yesterday's BBC Proms matinée performance, is concerned that British youth are alienated by the traditions that still dictate that classical music should be played to rows of silent, seated listeners.

"Young people don't like concert halls... and wouldn't normally go to one except for amplified music," he says in a radio interview to be broadcast today. "There is a big divide between amplified and non-amplified music. The future must bring things that are considered blasphemous, like amplifying classical music in an atmosphere where people can come and go, and even perhaps? and certainly leave in the middle of a movement if they feel like it."

Harvey, 71, is one of the senior figures of classical music in Britain. A visiting professor of music at Oxford University and at Imperial College London, he has composed four string quartets, three operas and choral and orchestral works, including his Passion and Resurrection, the subject of a BBC television film. This weekend he voiced fears that if orchestras and conductors hang on to the orthodox method of performance they will end up playing to empty halls.

"Nobody should be deprived of classical music, least of all by silly conventions," he said.

But Harvey's views run against those of many evangelists for the timeless appeal of classical music. Julian Lloyd Webber, the cellist and brother of Andrew, is happy to popularise works normally regarded as "classical", but believes that to routinely amplify the sound of orchestral instruments or to allow audiences to move around would be to attack a central part of the experience.

"Tinkering around with classical music in this way is not going to do what Jonathan hopes it will," he said. "Of course I have played amplified music in concert myself, and the problem is that you are no longer in control. Even if you go through it all with the sound technicians in rehearsal, in concert you don't really know what the audience is hearing and this takes control of the performance away from the performer."

Innovative projects that have brought classical music into unlikely environments, such as those championed by John Berry at the English National Opera, are much more viable, Lloyd Webber believes. Berry's company has collaborated on unconventional work with the Young Vic theatre in London, and this summer, in partnership with the avant garde theatre group Punchdrunk, the ENO took a production of The Duchess of Malfi into a London warehouse.

Lloyd Webber is happy to see music played outside old-fashioned concert halls. "They have done some experiments with playing it in nightclubs, and I think that can work very well," he said. "You can pick up an idea of the music while you're walking around and I think that does introduce it to a new audience. But if you were to allow people to come and go in a concert hall, you would change the nature of the whole experience." Harvey, Lloyd Webber believes, would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if sound systems were regularly used: "You would be in danger of losing all the sense of nuance, and that is a large part of what this kind of music is about. It is, and ought to be, a totally different experience to listening to rock music, and that could actually be part of its appeal. We should not be forced to try to turn it into something it isn't."

While Lloyd Webber agrees with Harvey that many people are not at home in the concert hall, he puts this down to failures in musical education. "Classical music does have a bit of a lost generation of forty-somethings who were just not introduced to music in school so do not think it is part of their world," he said.

A potential template for the future was seen in Dorset last month. Billed as the UK's first classical music festival, thousands of fans descended on a site outside the village of Kimmeridge to dance, drink and celebrate their favourite soprano. Visitors described scenes at the Serenata festival as being more reminiscent of a rock festival. Organisers said they wanted a more diverse audience, comparable with the folk-tinged Green Man festival in south Wales.

Bob Shingleton's interview with Jonathan Harvey on the FM community radio station Future Radio is broadcast and webcast on 107.8FM at 3pm today.

(Hyperion)

The quality of any cathedral choir is governed by the standard of its trebles; they come and go so rapidly as the years pass and their voices break that to maintain a consistently high level is every choirmaster's headache. Wells is currently enjoying a superb top line, rewardingly displayed in this collection of Jonathan Dove's radiant choral works, including a first recording of his sparkling Missa Brevis, commissioned last year for the Cathedral Organists' Association with the stipulation that it should be in reach of any good church choir. It makes an attractive, stimulating addition to the liturgy.

(Linn Records)

Scotland had some very beautiful medieval music preserved in a St Andrews manuscript alongside French repertory. One piece nestles here among plainchant and alluring modern vocal items by composers ranging from true Scots such as James MacMillan (his superb Os mutorum) and James McCarthy (the hypnotic The Stars in Their Courses) to Joanne Metcalf, Peter McGarr and John Tavener. All pick up on the distinctive resonance of Scots spirituality and the immaculate tuning and balance of the four female singers of Canty. William Taylor weaves harp interludes with atmospheric skill, even enhancing the plainchant. Ethereally beautiful.