Almost every performer or composer I've met cannot stomach hearing their own recordings - even when they're the best you could ever hope to hear. Why not?

Talking to pianist Richard Goode for this week's Music Matters, he said something to me that seemed to take self-deprecation to new heights. I asked him if he listened to his recordings - "absolutely not!" he said, and looked shocked at the very idea. Thing is, that would be a weird reaction if it weren't so common: pretty well every musician or composer I've ever talked to, from Thomas Ade[grave]s to Krystian Zimerman, has said the same thing - that listening to their own recordings, or their own music, is something close to a kind of existential torture.

Now I don't think anyone would expect Simon Rattle to go home and luxuriate in the sounds of his own brilliance with his recordings of the Brahms Symphonies every night to serenade Magdalena Kozena and the kids, or Peter Maxwell Davies to accompany an Orcadian sunset with a favourite CD of one of his symphonies. But for the rest of us who buy, enjoy, and listen again to favourite albums by, among hundreds of others, Richard Goode and Krystian Zimerman, it's strange to think that these recordings seem to be so un-loved by the musicians who made them. Perhaps it's the same thing that many of us experience when you hear a recording of your own voice: that uncanny sense of realising that you sound totally different to the person you hear in your head.

Or could it be something deeper - that hearing old recordings, or a piece from a few years ago, is a psychological block to a performer's or a composer's creativity: "that's who I was, but it's not who I am now"? Or even more dangerous: "I was better back then..."

Glenn Gould was the rare exception, a musician who ended up only communing with the recording studio and having a close relationship with hearing his piano-playing through a pair of speakers. It all presents a strange paradox: that's it's the record-buying/downloading/streaming public who end up having a closer relationship with the recordings our favourite musicians make than the performers themselves.

So Richard, even if you can't stand the thought of listening to them, I'm still going to put on those Beethoven Sonatas. They're not that bad, honest!...

I need help. What is there apart from empty rumty-tum, trivial jollity - well, and the odd good tune - in Bellini's bel canto operas?

I remember when it happened, the first - and only - time I ever fell asleep in an opera. Jane Eaglen was on stage in one of her career-defining roles as the heroine in Bellini's Norma at Scottish Opera in Glasgow. And as a callow teenager, I didn't know how lucky I was to be hearing this stellar performance, and somewhere during Act 2, I think, I fell into a slumber. I think I may have quite enjoyed Casta Diva, but that was about it. Thing is, after castigating myself for my philistine snooze, I then started to blame Bellini. Was it something in the music that made me unable to resist the temptation for 40 winks? The rumty-tum of his accompaniments, the banality of the melodies, the transparency of his orchestrations, the apparent disconnect between the emotional trajectory of the story and the near-continuous triviality and joviality of the music (well, the music I heard, that is, before my eyelids closed)? I tried more bel canto with Donizetti, but found The Elixir of Love almost as trite, and only Verdi and Puccini of the Italians had moments of real expressive depth.

Or so I thought as a probably - ok, certainly! - rather pompous, musically Germanophile teenager. I now realise the error of my ways with Verdi and Puccini, but Bellini, Donizetti? I'm still not there. Alright, when you hear a Natalie Dessay or a Juan Diego Florez sing it, there's am irresistibly voluptuous pleasure at hearing singing and virtuosity of that quality. That I understand. But apart from momentary glimpses of great tunes, I still need a Bellini and bel canto epiphany. It's possible I'll find it at Opera North and their new Norma that opened on Saturday - at least, I hope so. Otherwise, I'm with Tchaikovsky - who admittedly loved Bellini's tunes but could see his shortcomings, too - and called aspects of his operas vapid...vulgar...trivial". How can I, and Pytor Ilyich, be converted?...

Jonathan Harvey has fused electronics with orchestras more sensually, and spiritually, than any other British composer. But he has a challenge to his fellow musicians: why doesn't more contemporary music take advantage of the new worlds of sound that electronics offer?

As you'll read and hear if you follow the links in my interview with Jonathan Harvey, you'll discover how he fuses electronics with acoustic instruments more seamlessly and sensuously than pretty well any other composer around. As I say in the piece, he uses electronics not to find new realms of abstraction, but to realise the other realms, the visions of the beyond he wants to conjure. But when I spoke to him, as serene and tranquil as he was, he had strong words for his fellow composers. The surprise, he says, is that "so few composers have used electronics. They are still hardly there in orchestral culture" - three decades after Harvey first used computers to amplify the sonic resources of acoustic instruments. "For me, it's a development of colour, of possibility," Harvey says.

Previous centuries saw the progressive refinement of string instruments, the increasing accuracy and power of wind and brass instruments, with chromatic horns and chromatic trumpets, and then, in the last years of the 20th and 21st centuries - nothing. Well, not in terms of the institutions of the orchestra. It's no longer the case that the technology is expensive or unwieldy - and after all, all of the halls that our orchestras play in regularly put on gigs that use technology and amplification - it's just that outside new music ensembles such as the London Sinfonietta, or adventurous groups like the Aurora Orchestra, orchestral culture has remained largely untouched by the possibilities that today's exponentially enhanced electronics have to offer.

Who's to blame? The orchestras for their creative laziness or the composers for not taking advantage of the sonic possibilities of today's world? Harvey's words are a challenge to both. And for proof of what's possible, listen to the music you'll hear at the Barbican in London this weekend in the BBC's Total Immersion in Harvey's music, or on Radio 3.

Gustav Leonhardt was the most austere of the fathers of the Early Music movement. But there's more to his personality, and playing, than intellectual rigour - even if he did wear the sharpest suits of any harpsichordist, ever...

Gustav Leonhardt, who died on Monday, was one of the most austere musicians in the history of 20th century music - as well as being one its most important, as the single most uncompromising and rigorous of the fathers of the Early Music movement. Meeting him in recent years, the harpsichordist, organist, and conductor had a severe countenance and raptor-like concentration and seriousness. His diamond-like precision of playing and thought was matched by the sharp cut of his suits and his rake-thin body.

If you compare his recordings of, say, the Goldberg Variations to Glenn Gould's, it's not just the instrument that's different; Leonhardt's historically-informed rectitude sounds like an intellectual corrective to Gould's mannerisms and improvisational brilliance. But it was too easy to make the mistake of hearing too much of the man in the music, and imagining that his music-making was all about qualities of dry, humourless academicism.

There was more to Leonhardt. He was responsible for one of the single greatest recording projects of all time, his survey of the complete Bach Cantatas in partnership with Nikolaus Harnoncourt (a musician he was temperamentally opposed to: "Harnoncourt is a different character and he goes for compromise consciously", he said). And underneath all that buttoned up exterior there was - well, if not exactly seething passions, at least not that came out in his performances - a lightness, elegance, deftness, and range in his playing that was revelatory. And not just in Bach, either: Byrd, Sweelinck, Frescobaldi, and dozens of others were all illuminated by Leonhardt's performances.

And in fact, there is humour, albeit of a dry kind, in his playing and his personality. You can see some touching footage of him giving some inspirational - and occasionally funny - instruction in a masterclass here. Even more astonishingly, here is a bootlegged but good quality video of the final concert Leonhardt gave before deciding not to play in public again, from the 12th of December last year at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. My favourite performance here is the weird and wonderful G major Chaconne by Bo[umlaut]hm, but the whole programme shows Leonhardt was still at the height of his powers. Leonhardt's legacy through his teaching, his example, and his playing is incalculable. Among those he inspired was Richard Egarr, Director of the Academy of Ancient Music. At gramophone.co.uk, here's how he remembered this mentor of Early Music:

"He was an aristocratic man, in some ways demonstrating odd contradictions. His living environment was utterly 18th century - a CD player and fax machine were, I think, grudging additions to the household. At the same time he had a passion for fast cars. I remember going on a trip with him and Marie to see a couple of old organs in Holland; being carried there extremely fast along the Dutch motorway in his latest Alfa. After seeing the second organ somewhere in a small suburb it was late and dark and we were somewhat lost. No sat-nav of course. Gustav just looked up at the sky to get his bearings from the North Star... His passing is a huge loss."

159 years after it was composed, Andras Schiff has given the first ever performance premiere of a hauntingly magical piano miniature by the 20-year-old Brahms, discovered by Christopher Hogwood. It premieres on Radio 3 on 21 January

Read the news story

They are words I never thought I would say as a presenter: "So now, let's hear a world premiere ? by Brahms ?". But, pinching myself, that's what happened when the great Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff sat down in a studio for Radio 3's Music Matters to play a piece in A minor, called Albumblatt ? "Sheet from an Album" ? by the person who discovered it, conductor and scholar Christopher Hogwood.

In the library at Princeton, Hogwood was offered the chance to see a book that belonged to the director of music in Göttingen. He saw signatures of the famous musicians who had come to dinner with him, including Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Schumann ? and was astonished to find this complete little work by Brahms, composed in 1853 when he was 20.

Written on a single side of music manuscript, it's a proper piece, as you'll hear in Schiff's performance on 21 January, complete with expressive markings, dynamics, and repeat marks. And it has a hauntingly beautiful tune that Brahms-lovers may find familiar: it's the same melody, in a different key, from the Trio section of the Scherzo of his Horn Trio, composed 12 years later.

(Bärenreiter will publish the piece with Hogwood's new edition of the Trio, which he was, by complete coincidence, working on when he discovered the Albumblatt). This "new" piece is a secret from Brahms's past that tells us a lot about how he composed. Ever the perfectionist, he threw away or destroyed his sketches and manuscripts of pieces he thought weren't worthy of him. But this one, hidden away in Göttingen, escaped his censure. Thanks to Hogwood, it's a little Brahmsian gem that all pianists will surely want to play after they hear it in its belated premiere performance and broadcast next week, 159 years after it was composed.

The country's best hall for orchestral music? No contest: Birmingham's Symphony Hall. And it's celebrating its 21 years in style.

The country's best, big acoustic for orchestral music? A straw poll of punters, musicians, soloists, and conductors would surely put Birmingham's Symphony Hall at the top. All right, there's no scientific statistical data to back that up, but it's true; well, at least, it's what I think! The point is, if you live in Birmingham, you're lucky, because you've got a hall that shames any other big hall in the country. And this year - starting this week - Symphony Hall celebrates its musical majority, reaching the venerable old age of 21.

I remember when it opened, when Simon Rattle, the presiding inspiration and guiding genius of the project consecrated it with a concert of Turnage and his favourite symphony of symphonies, Mahler's Second, broadcast live on TV, complete with Simon's apprently polka-dotted cummerbund. Through the past-made-present of the internet, you can re-live the final moments of that night in 1991 here but Birmingham celebrates Symphony Hall with its 21st Anniversary Festival from now until June.

Naturally, there are concerts from the CBSO and their current maestro, Andris Nelsons, and the now knighted Sir Simon will also make an appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic, but it all started last night with a visit from the Royal Opera House with a concert performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger with Antonio Pappano. That's the first of four Wagner operas Symphony hall will host, including Parsifal from Gergiev and the Mariinsky, Die Walküre from Opera North, and Nelsons conducting Tristan und Isolde with his house band. All that, and a royal command performance of Elgar's The Music Makers, comedy from Billy Connolly, jazz from Wynton Marsalis, baroque-orchestral serial-killing melodrama from John Malkovich in The Infernal Comedy, Phil Minton's Feral Choir and a Mobile Sinfonia. The orchestral concerts are the thing, though. If you haven't heard Symphony Hall in the flesh, 2012's the time to do it - and it'll be cheaper, and more musically fulfilling, than a trip to space, after Birmingham bested the cosmos in the New York Times's list of 100 places to see this year...

The great Italian pianist is 70 today. We celebrate - and listen to - his legacy as pianist, musician, and advocate of contemporary music.

Today is Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini's 70th birthday. There aren't many pianists whose CV runs from left-wing political activism to winning one of the worlds' most prestigious competitions, from commissioning and championing the rawest bleeding edges of contemporary music to building a reputation as one of the classics' and romantics' most coruscating interpreters. Yet Pollini has done all that, and more. He also, incidentally, has an no-holds-barred addiction to coffee and cigarettes which once landed him, the BBC, and me in a spot of bother: interviewing him at one of London's poshest hotels, he flagrantly defied the warnings not to smoke in the rooms, risking landing himself on the streets and the production team with a hefty fine. Maurizio didn't care and chain-smoked and espresso-ed his way through the interview.

So what is it that makes Pollini such a revered, revolutionary, but still controversial, musician? First of all, there's his (usually) umimpeachable technique. Have a listen to this, one of his most famous recordings, a disc of Webern, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and above all Boulez, the scarcely imaginable difficulties of the Second Sonata, which Pollini dispatches with an unmatched combination of precision, violence and expressive intensity. But there's also his lucid clarity and lyricism. It was his Chopin playing that won him the Chopin Competition in Warsaw when he was still a teenager; this disc of the Op 28 Preludes contains some of the most ravishing playing of these pieces you'll hear. And while it's a cliché to say that Pollini's playing is all about structure and imposing intellectual command, his Chopin is among the most considered and least sentimental you can hear - try these later recordings of the 4 Ballades to see what I mean.

Now, I said "usually unimpeachable" because there is another side to Pollini's pianism, which is that when things don't go right, they don't go right on a grand scale. I heard him play Beethoven sonatas at the Lucerne Festival last summer, performances that put an intellectual idea above mere practical realisation: in order to remove the pieces from any sense of cosseting familiarity, he played the Appassionata and Waldstein Sonatas at speeds that no human hands - and certainly not his own - could keep up with, and the result was playing of meaningless blandness and generalised impressionism.

But at his best, as in the Pollini-Project and Pollini-Perspectives concerts that he has been playing all over the world in recent seasons, programmes that put together new commissions as well as his favourite Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono pieces (including ...sofferte onde serene... composed for Pollini in 1976), with Beethoven, Chopin, and the classical repertoire, Pollini does something that no other pianist manages. He connects the blazing imagination of the new music he plays with his approach to the classics, releasing the timeless modernity at the heart of say, a Beethoven sonata, with the exploded classical conventions of such music as Boulez's sonatas. A live performance of Boulez's Second Sonata in Paris a couple of years ago, which Pollini played from memory, is one of the pianistic highlights of my life.

My personal favourite Pollini recording? It's one of those discs that introduced me to a masterpiece of the repertoire at an impressionable age, which fused performance and work forever in my imagination: his recording of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic and his great friend and collaborator, conductor Claudio Abbado. It's a Pollini classic, I think, making Brahms sound shockingly muscular, dynamic, and extreme, music-making that takes nothing for granted. Listen, enjoy, and wish Maurizio a happy, and youthful, 70th!

Tom Service picks his highlights of the year ahead

New Music 20 x 12

More than a good pun ? a good idea, too: 20 new pieces, all 12 minutes long, will premiere across the country throughout the year, from hardcore classical to jazz. Joe Cutler's Ping! has been composed for table-tennis players; there's Emily Howard's mini-opera on the life of Czech runner Emil Zátopek in Liverpool; plus David Bruce's Fire, an outdoor operatic spectacular, in Salisbury. All 20 pieces will be broadcast on Radio 3. Howard Skempton's Five Rings Triple is on Radio 3 tomorrow. The Southbank Centre, London SE1, will feature all projects 13?15 July.

Jonathan Harvey: Total Immersion

One of our most visionary composers gets the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Total Immersion treatment over a weekend in January, in London, and on Radio 3. There are Harvey's Buddhist-inspired orchestral works, the meditative brilliance of his choral pieces and, best of all, the British premiere of his opera Wagner Dream, Harvey's most ambitious fusion yet of western aesthetics and eastern philosophy. Barbican, London EC2, 28?29 January.

Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress

David McVicar returns to his roots for his first production of Stravinsky's glittering, ghoulish morality tale for Scottish Opera in March. There's an excellent cast, with Carolyn Sampson as Anne Trulove and Steven Page as Nick Shadow, in a piece that ought to suit McVicar's searching Mephistophelean stagecraft. Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 17?25 March, Festival theatre, Edinburgh, 27?31 March.

Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven Cycle

We don't know much about next year's Proms season, but we do know what the hottest ticket will be: Daniel Barenboim's complete cycle of Beethoven's symphonies with the passionate players of his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It all starts with a performance of the Ninth, on the first day of the Olympics. Start queuing in South Kensington now. Royal Albert Hall, London SW7, July and August.

Oliver Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop!

Knussen's two masterful Maurice Sendak-based operas finally receive another production, in what should be a visionary multimedia staging by director and designer Netia Jones. With the Britten Sinfonia at the Aldeburgh festival in June and later at the Barbican in London, Knussen's dazzling music and Sendak's archetypal monsters, animals and hero, Max, will be brought to life through animation, lighting and stage magic. Aldeburgh festival, June; Barbican, October.

Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest

The European premiere of Gerald Barry's new Oscar Wilde opera (it went down a storm in Los Angeles earlier this year) is essential for anyone who cares about the future of the art form ? and surrealist operatic cross-dressing. In his house in Galway, Barry sang me an aria he had written for Lady Bracknell, cast here as a basso profundo. Passionate Barry-champion Thomas Adès conducts; there is a stellar cast; and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group provide the tunes. Barbican, 26 April, Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 28 April. bcmg.org.uk

The Ring at Covent Garden

All right, Covent Garden has done it before, but putting on the Ring is still an Olympic-size challenge. After the sporting shenanigans have finished, Covent Garden will stage four complete cycles of Keith Warner's production of Wagner's world-shaking tetralogy in the autumn. Let's hope Bryn Terfel turns up to sing this time; and hopefully you'll be able to get a ticket a bit cheaper than the £1,000 they are asking for the best seats. Royal Opera House, London WC2, 24 September to 2 November. roh.org.uk

On Monday 19 December 2011 we streamed a live performance of Mozart's Requiem with the choir of King's College, Cambridge, and the Aurora orchestra. It is now available to watch on demand until midnight on Christmas day

Here, Tom Service explains why the mysteries of Mozart's final piece are richer and stranger than ever ...

? To tweet about the event use the hashtag #guardianmozart

There's a seductive, chilling mystery around the story of Mozart's Requiem ? which the Aurora Orchestra will play and which we'll be streaming here on Monday, the climax of Kings Place's Mozart Unwrapped season.

It's got everything: a genuinely weird commission from a courtly intermediary who asked Mozart to write a piece for Count von Walsegg, so that the pretentious count could pass off the piece as his own composition to commemorate the death of his wife; a young composer of genius writing his first setting of the Mass for the Dead, and finding an absolutely distinctive musical voice to do so; and his tragically early death at the age of 35 after he had written around two-thirds of the work's musical material. He died after composing eight bars of the Requiem's Lacrimosa, the last words he set to music marking "that day of tears and mourning".

You would think it's more the creation of a Hollywood potboiler than reality, but it did actually happen: one of the world's greatest composers died writing what turned out to be his own Requiem. (Playwright Peter Shaffer added a fictional gloss to the Requiem story in his Amadeus, making the commission come from a black-masked Antonio Salieri, who wants to take credit for the piece as his own, and kill Mozart along the way ? as if the facts weren't already suggestive enough.)

But the real mystery of the piece, as you'll hear on Monday, isn't so much the story but the music that Mozart did manage to write. A clue to how we should hear the Requiem comes from composer Michael Finnissy's recent completion of the piece, which imagined what Mozart would do today, with another couple of centuries of musical history in his brain and his ears. (Aurora and the choir of King's College Cambridge, conducted by Stephen Cleobury, will perform the Requiem in the completion by his pupil Franz Süssmayr that is most often performed, even if it's still controversial.) The problem is that it's too easy to take the Requiem for granted and not hear what Mozart was actually doing in his composition. Finnissy rightly pointed out that the apparent stylistic fusion of influences from Schubert to Bruckner, Beethoven to Busoni, in his versions of the movements Mozart didn't write, is really an extension of a principle you hear throughout the music he did finish before the early hours of 5 December 1791.

That's because the Requiem is already a historical palimpsest. Mozart is fusing his researches into earlier repertoire ? unusually for the time, Mozart devoured all he could of the music of Handel and Bach and earlier composers towards the end of his life ? with the advances he had made in his own music. In fact, there are moments of outright pilfery: Mozart knew Handel's Messiah inside out, having made a new orchestration of the oratorio, and (as I've pointed out before!), if you listen to the dotted rhythms in the strings of the Requiem's first movement, the Introitus, and the first fugue theme of the Kyrie, and compare them to consecutive movements from the Messiah (Surely, He Hath Borne Our Griefs, then And With His Stripes), the similarity would have today's copyright lawyers rubbing their hands in glee.

In the Requiem's use of arcane counterpoint, and its evocation of a strange liturgical archaism, right from the very first bar (something Mozart achieves through a paradoxically new-fangled combination of orchestral colours ? trombones, basset horns, a continuo section of organ and low strings as well as a more conventional 18th century orchestral lineup), Mozart turns his Requiem into a reflection and intensification of earlier models of musical grief.

But the music he did leave us with has something else, too. All right, maybe the reality and myths around his death play a part in this, but the music of the Requiem is uniquely heartbreaking. For me, it's not the fire and brimstone of the Dies Irae or even the revelatory terror of the Almighty in Mozart's choral writing for the Rex Tremendae movement, the "King of Majesty", that's most affecting, but the quartet for the four soloists, the Recordare.

Coming in between the austere choral pillars of the Rex Tremendae and the Confutatis, the intimacy and tenderness of the Recordare is devastating in its beauty, the Requiem's only vision of a world not wracked by pain or lament. It can't last, of course, but it's precisely because it's a fleeting glimpse of serenity that the Recordare is so shockingly moving. It's possible to understand what Mozart is doing in the Requiem with his historical musical models, and it's even possible to prise apart the myths from the realities of what actually happened at the end of 1791, but there's an endlessly fascinating enigma in the astonishing music Mozart did manage to compose. Enjoy it all ? whether it's your hundredth Requiem or your first ? live here on Monday.

Elliott Carter celebrated his 103rd birthday last weekend. Not with a retrospective, but with the premieres of three new pieces. Happy birthday, Elliott

Not many composers will ever celebrate their 103rd birthday ? but then, not that many people in the history of humanity have ever reached or will ever reach that astonishingly advanced prime number of an age. But no one has ever marked their 103rd, I can confidently predict, with three world premieres. But in New York last weekend, that's exactly what Elliott Carter did with concerts on 8 and 11 December.

As ever with Carter, the statistics are as shocking as they're now predictable, but after the festivities that accompanied his 100th birthday in 2008, Carter has been getting on with what he does best, composing music of coruscating beauty, intensity, and hard-won classicism. In fact, so consistent has his stream of new pieces been in the last three years that it's become all too easy to take him and his music for granted, as if he will somehow always be there. He won't, of course, but I'll wager his music, and his recent music especially, will be.

To celebrate Carter's birthday, you can watch three fascinating films of him, made in summer last year, in which he remembers speakeasies and prohibition, studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, recounting the story of his opera, What Next? and his relationship with the poetry he's been setting in many of his recent works.

Best of all, you can see 23 Carter scores ? one of the hundreds Boosey's let you study, for free, from their catalogue ? including a piece that had its world premiere on 8 December, a song-cycle for solo tenor and chamber orchestra based on the love poems of EE Cummings, A Sunbeam's Architecture. There was no sentimentality from Carter at the celebrations for his 103rd, just more work, more exploration, more going un-gently into the crucible of his creativity. However, the rest of us can celebrate, marvel, and above all, immerse ourselves in his music.

Many may sneer, but Delius's concertos for violin, cello, and his double concerto for both, show that musical fashion has got it wrong. This is great music

Sometimes a recording comes along that you feel you've been waiting your whole life for. Like so many of us living in a Delius-drought, I and countless others have been longing for a disc to be released that would create the simplest possible concerto-combination, and give the people what they have been crying out for these past decades: I mean, of course, new recordings of Delius's late, great string concertos, for violin, cello, and the double concerto for both. And thank the recording gods and all of their minions, because Chandos has recently done just that, releasing a CD of
fabulous performances from violinist Tasmin Little, cellist Paul Watkins, with Andrew Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. (Among other occasional recordings of the individual concertos, there was an earlier coupling of the Cello Concerto and the Double Concerto from Little, Raphael Wallfisch, and Charles Mackerras, but the newcomer holds all before it.)

It's possible some of you ? most of you? all of you? ? are bridling at that whole concatenation of the words "great" and "Delius". But I stand by my assessment of these pieces, some of the least fashionable music by one of British music's least fashionable composers. Well, fashion be damned! All right, yes, my affection for these pieces is partly for reasons of sentimental nostalgia, because it was Jacqueline du Pré's recording of the Cello Concerto with Malcolm Sargent that I used to listen to on a loop while salivating over Chris Bonington's photo-essays of Himalayan expeditions, fusing two powerful imaginative experiences in my brain while outside the grey rains of Glasgow lashed the window-pane ? told you it was a sentimental memory! ? but there are things in these pieces that you won't find in so concentrated a form in any other 20th century string concerto.

They're all cast in single movements that last over 20 minutes, and they all share a continuous, unbounded lyricism that makes them some of the supreme flowerings of pure melodic invention in 20th-century orchestral music, up there with Strauss's Four Last Songs or Metamorphosen, in my book. Don't believe me? Try the Double Concerto, especially the passage that leads up to the final climax, an orgiastic outpouring of melody and figuration that I will move you to the core. You could say the same about the more ambiguous music of the end of the Cello Concerto, or the opening of the Violin Concerto; it's all music that speaks directly to whatever bits of our brains and bodies that control our emotions.

Well, it does for me anyway, but it's not just for their aching beauty that these concertos are so memorable. Contrary to popular critical opinion, these concertos aren't mindless overflowing of sentiment instead of structure; the reason they work is precisely because Delius's control of the shape of the pieces is unerringly sure. These works are, for me, the acme of a kind of concerto in which it's not a dialectic of opposition or argument that drives the drama, but a mutual sharing of melody, line, and sheer expressiveness.

Sermon over. And thankfully there's no need to take me at my word: make your own mind by giving yourself an early Christmas present, and buying the new recordings. You won't regret it.

Russell got inside the psychological and emotional realities of the composers he loved, for which we should be ever grateful

I had two surpassingly strange obsessions as a teenage music lover: Anton Bruckner and Arnold Bax. And so, it turned out, did Ken Russell. I could hardly believe it when, after making his Bruckner film in 1990, The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner ? a study of the Austrian composer's obsessive compulsive disorders, monastic seclusion and infatuation with young girls ? Russell made a TV film a couple of years later about Bax, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, the biggest prime-time exposure this otherwise little-known English composer is probably ever going to get.

Russell himself played Bax, and Glenda Jackson took the role of one of Bax's lovers, the pianist Harriet Cohen (in fact one of her last acting jobs before devoting her life to politics). But the scene that's burned into my brain ? as I remember it ? is when Russell's Bax takes another woman, a dancer called Annie (played by Russell's then wife Hetty Baynes), down to the beach for a truly extraordinary erotic rendezvous. Sitting on a deckchair on the sand, Russell/Bax puts his tone-poem about the sensual power of the sea, The Garden of Fand, on a wind-up gramophone as his paramour cavorts in the sea, becoming the sea-siren that Bax's music celebrates. At the climax of the scene, with the underscore of Bax's most passionate music, composer and consort entwine in an encouplement that was more elephantine than elegant.

The Bax film probably isn't Russell's finest about music and musicians ? his Delius, Mahler, and Elgar movies take pride of place in that pantheon ? but it symbolised what I liked about his films so much: that he was unafraid of celebrating his eccentric musical obsessions, and that he tried to get inside the psychological and emotional realities of the composers whose music he loved.

Mere biographical fact isn't the point in either the Bruckner or the Bax films, but they were both insightful portrayals of composers whose stories were unfamiliar to most TV audiences. And I think there was more to Russell's casting of himself as Bax than the fact they were both men of a certain age who looked like devotees of a life well, and boozily, lived. They were both eccentric auteurs, both outside the mainstream, and both fantastical dreamers.

Every composer who Russell immortalised in celluloid has reason to be grateful to him, from Wagner to Martinu, Liszt to Tchaikovsky, Bruckner to Bax.

? Read music documentary maker John Bridcut's analysis of Ken Russell's film scores and join the debate.

? This article was amended on 11 January 2012. The original photo caption referred to Ken Loach's The Music Lovers (1970). This has been corrected.

I'm shocked to be writing this, but the long-awaited National Music Plan makes a positive and even occasionally inspiring read.

It's been a long time coming, and it's been a long time delayed, but today, the Department of Education finally published The Importance of Music - A National Plan for Music Education. And the news is - and I'm not a little shocked to be writing this - it's really pretty good. In fact, given the circumstances of where we are in terms of the economic and possibly social apocalypse, the National Music Plan makes a positive and even occasionally inspiring read.

To save you wading through its 55 pages, 149 points, and nine case studies, herewith a digest of some of the plan's main principles. The first, and most important thing that the NMP does is enshrine ring-fenced money for music education for the next three years. Yes, the money is going steadily and predictably down from £82.5m this year to £77m, £65m, and £60m until 2015, but for the government to have accepted the necessity of dedicated money for music education - making it unique among all school subjects - means that they've listened to the Henley Review from earlier this year. And it means that this government hasn't gone down the disastrous path of previous a previous Tory (oh, alright, Tory-led-coalition) administration and removed the lifeline of ring-fenced money, as Margaret Thatcher did in the early 1980s. (There are also good omens about music's place on the National Curriculum: the Curriculum Review isn't out until next year, but the NMP says: "All schools should provide high quality music education as part of a broad and balanced curriculum. Schools will want to review how they do this in light of this National Plan and following proposals from the National Curriculum review early in 2012. Schools, however, will be expected to provide high quality music education."

The point is, of course, what's going to happen to that money. The big idea - or rather, Henley's big idea, which the NMP supports - is the idea of music education hubs. These hubs will be led by a key partner, in most cases, probably a Music Service, and their remit is to be the centre of music provision in local authority areas. (However, the hubs, the Arts Council of England tells us, will be fewer in number than the current Music Services, because some may take in two Local Authorities, according to conditions in different areas).

Mention of the ACE brings up one of the real sea-changes of the NMP (apologies for all the acronyms): it will be the ACE who will disburse the money for the hubs and assess their performance, which are all supposed to be up and running by September 2012. The Arts Council will audit the applications, and will hold each hub to account if they fail to fulfil their core objectives. And here's where the hub-ology gets interesting: the hubs have a clear set of objectives and responsibilities that pupils, parents, schools, as well as the ACE, will be able to hold them accountable to. Every child between the ages of five and 18 has to have the chance to learn an instrument through whole-class tuition; there should be opportunities to play in larger ensembles; there must be clear progression routes "available and affordable to all young people" - a crucial phrase, that; and every pupil should be given the opportunity to sing regularly thanks to a "singing strategy". That's all good, clear stuff, I think - especially when it comes to a commitment that pathways through the education system to further study for talented children ought to be "affordable for all". You can take that with a pinch of salt, since it'll be affordable up to the point you decide to take on potentially crippling debts at university or college, but there's more in the NMP that suggests the hubs will be sensitive to pupil's individual circumstances. Point 40 says, "Many pupils, particularly those who have progressed beyond the initial first access, may not be able to afford to pay for musical opportunities, tuition, travel or instruments. In delivering their services, hubs will need to take account of this, and where necessary offer free or subsidised provision to pupils who do not have the ability to pay". Just one of the many things the ACE will need to assess the hubs on when they get going. Strikingly, all pupils in Key Stages 1 and 2 should expect the inspirational experience of hearing professional musicians play for them, the NMP says.

There are good words, and even better, there's definitive, actual cash for training primary school teachers to have more confidence in their music lessons, a crucial problem at the moment; there's more money to extend the In Harmony projects (England's El Sistema projects), and in the spirit of the joined-up thinking that connects the Department of Education with the ACE (music is the first art-form to have forged such close links), there's an expectation that the hubs will be about building partnerships between schools, teachers, ensembles, and as many local musical institutions as possible.

The most controversial element of the plan is to do with how the NMP proposes resolving the issues of the patchiness of provision. The plan replaces the less-than-transparent way funds are currently divvied up among the Local Education Authorities with a "per pupil" system. More pupils, more cash. Simple. That sounds fair in principle, and it's hard to argue with the line of thinking, but it will mean that some currently "over-privileged" areas will experience a big shortfall of funding (although there's provision in the plan for money to cushion the blow in areas that will be hardest hit).

The challenges, though, are clear. It all rests on the hubs, and the ACE's vetting and assessing of them. There's a tight timetable to get it all up and running, and for all the protestations to the contrary, there will still be an inherent patchiness in the system, depending on how much individual hubs charge for their services, and how effectively all of the institutions in their area work together. The Music Services, in particular, are going to have to get used to new, more collaborative ways of working. And however you look at it, the whole sector is going to have to do more with less, even with the ring-fenced money.

But the really heartening thing about the NMP is that the government does seem to have got the message about the transformative importance of music education. To see the following in the black and white of a government document gives you hope: "Music can make a powerful contribution to the education and development of children... It is a unique form of communication that can change the way pupils feel, think and act... Research has shown a direct link between music and improved reading ability in children." The NMP also recognises the fact that "studies have demonstrated the positive impact music can have on personal and social development, including increased self reliance, confidence, self-esteem, sense of achievement and ability to relate to others." In its clarity, its sense of accountability, and its moments of music-educational vision, there are reasons to be cheerful about the NMP. A plan, of course, isn't enough, and it's what happens next that really counts. But the NMP is a good place to start.

Maverick, eccentric? Words can't describe this prolific Finnish composer ? which probably explains his symphonies' titles

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most prolific symphonist of all? The answer is staring right back at you in the photo above: the gigantic bearded countenance of Finnish composer, conductor and extreme symphonist, Leif Segerstam. So far, he's written 251 (no, that's not a typo), but by the time I've finished writing this, he could well have completed another, since his average output is about 20 every year. (He isn't, though, the world record-holder: Rowan Taylor, an American composer who died in 2005, wrote 265. I've never heard ? or even heard of ? a performance of any of them. If you have, let me know?)

Nearly all of Segerstam's symphonies are cast in a single movement, lasting about 24 minutes. They're scored for unconducted symphony orchestra, and have some of the best and weirdest titles in music. No 233 is called Fragmental Völvations from My Opera-to-Be?; No 236, OUT is outside? (which makes sense); No 237, on the other hand, rejoices in the moniker After Catching THE Glimpse of LCY144&NEJ720? (which doesn't). Words such as maverick, eccentric or one-off hardly do justice to Segerstam's approach to life and music. In the course of a life conducting orchestras all over the world, he has perfected a Segerstamic dialect that deserves its own dictionary. Musician Graham Nasby has recorded some Segerstamisms from his rehearsals as a conductor, which include some brilliant neologisms and newfangled poetic aphorisms such as: "Somebody singing a far-fetched diagonals from Sibelius' Finlandia" ? "Three centimetres of wavy lines, then you play the music" ? "We get a plankton plasmatic flimmer" ? "Tonnmeister, are you heavy enough in the Glockenbox?" ? "Segerstam disease: gastronomical music" and my personal favourite: "More grease in the pianissimo."

But listening to the way he composes, it all makes a kind of sense, even when it shouldn't. Each of Segerstam's symphonies creates a world ? or maybe a gigantic meta-world is a better description ? that is somehow compelling as well as rambling; cosmic as well as chaotic. (I've heard only a handful; I'm still waiting for Radio 3 to broadcast a complete cycle as part of its Symphony series. Actually, that would be impossible since around 100 of Segerstam's symphonies are still awaiting their premieres, let alone recordings.)

Segerstam has his own notational language that allows performers freedom within set parameters, and his approach fuses chance-based aleatoric procedures with the rigour of Sibelius. His philosophical starting point is the end of Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, which is also cast in a single movement of about 20 minutes, and which Segerstam hears as a challenge to the next generation of symphonists to enter new realms of creativity.

Segerstam's music also attempts to release musicians into the present tense ? what Segerstam calls the "now point" of listening to one another, reacting to what we are hearing around us. He can condense his symphonies into just six pages of manuscript, and dreams of a time when everyone can access his music-making online ? a free gift to the world, "just like the guy from Linux", he told me for Radio 3's Music Matters. He also said his music was a way of connecting the quarks inside all of us to the quantum levels of universal matter, and that music is a route to the infinite. He's right, of course.

So, some listening: start with a recent disc, on Ondine, of his symphonies 81, 162 and 181 to see what I mean. And don't let the astronomical size of its nomenclaturical index ? as Segerstam might say ? put you off. They're worth 22-24 minutes of anyone's time. On which note, I'm off to find Segerstams's 228th, first performed by the Tampere Philharmonic in May this year, whose subtitle I'll give you in full (and then go for a lie-down):

Symphony No 228: Cooling my beard too (2) on "Sval"bard, "Spit"sbergen farewelling (on the "seal"ed waters) the blinding "spittingly" ice- (&eyes) cracking Sun (setstart on 22.8 ?!) with my son (JS) remembering nostalgically "lace"- (spets-) coverings of (eg) Venusmountains as well as all those got ? (lays ?) ? It is very windy on the tops, "the picked peaks for peeking into the ?s ?", "spets"-listening too ? 2 ? 8!"

Mark Elder named the five symphonies that changed musical history; here are my own picks

Beethoven 9
Yes, it's the chorus, of course, and the entire universe of the secular, the sacred and the joyous that Beethoven composes in the finale. But it's really the first movement that does it for me, a musical creation myth of vast emptinesses, overwhelming momentum, and one of the blackest, funereal codas ever written.

Brahms 4
The symphony as proto-postmodern palimpsest: the baroque, the romantics, the serialist and neo-classical futures, all variously transfigured and pre-figured by Brahms' multi-dimensional imagination.

Bruckner 8
Bruckner's visionary symphony is the most complete realisation of his gigantic, time-bending symphonic idea. But this piece also contains his most sensual music, in the radiant slow movement, as well as some of his darkest, in the first movement, and, in its final few minutes, his most shatteringly transcendent.

Mahler 1
Surely the boldest opening to any symphony - first or otherwise - of all time. A moment of stasis spreads over the whole orchestra, out of which a manic panoply of nature appears for the next hour: riots, dances, bacchanals, love songs, gigantic, earthly victories, they're all here.

Shostakovich 15
It starts with a jaunty flute-tune, but plumbs depths of feeling and musical possibility that even Shostakovich's previous 14 symphonies hadn't found. Musically, it's his most radical symphony, quoting Rossini and Wagner in baleful parodies; but it's his least bombastic and, in the slow movement and the chilling, percussive realisation of the hospital equipment Shostakovich had to put up with during his illness at the very end of the piece, his most moving.

* BBC4's second in its four-part Symphony series is on Thursday 10 November .

Comment on this article, and tell us about your own favourite symphonies, here