Simon Rattle's Tristan packs a punch at the Proms, but Anthony Negus's refined Walküre shows powerful things can come in small packages

This has been a weekend of Wagner, with Anthony Negus conducting Die Walküre at Longborough and Sir Simon Rattle taking on Tristan ? well, act two, anyway ? at the Proms last night with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. And which was more radical, more revelatory, more moving? On paper, this looks like a no-brainer: in the red corner, the chance to hear the OAE get their period-instrument chops around Tristan with a cast out of the top drawer of international Wagner-singing (including Ben Heppner's Tristan and Violeta Urmana's Isolde) in the company of the most famous conductor of his generation; and in the blue corner, the latest instalment of Longborough's shoestring Ring with a cast of relative ingénues, a specially convened festival orchestra, and a conductor who will be familiar only to operatic cognoscenti.

But in the end it was their similarities that were most striking. In her review of the Longborough Walküre, Rian Evans talked of the show's "intimacy and integrity", and she's right. But it was Negus's achievement with his 65-piece orchestra that I found most fascinating. Taking advantage of Longborough's Bayreuth-in-miniature acoustics, with its ideal balance between the singers and the musicians, Negus led a faultlessly structured Walküre that flickered and shone with new colour and insight. Using a mildly adapted version of the score (an arrangement that only the most distinguished of Wagnerians would spot, made for smaller German opera houses like Longborough that don't have room for 120 players in their pit) Negus was able to create a chamber-like rapport between the stage and the orchestra, to reveal the delicacy of Wagner's orchestration, as well as revelling in the score's big moments. Even more importantly, he paced the whole evening as well as I've ever heard a Wagner opera in performance. OK, so the Longborough Orchestra isn't the Berlin Philharmonic, and the relatively few strings were tiring by the end of the show, but this was the sort of refined, revelatory Wagner conducting that takes a lifetime to learn. Lee Bisset's Sieglinde was the pick of the vocal performances, but this is Negus's Ring, and all the better for it.

The benefits of Rattle's period-instrument Tristan were similar. The soundworld of the OAE's 1860s instruments and the reduced band at Longborough brought exactly the same dividends: greater textural transparency, a near-perfect balance with the voices, and the creation of a kaleidoscope of orchestral colour. Every bar of the OAE's performance had a clear dramatic purpose (apart from the odd moment when the players sounded like they were engaged in a battle for supremacy with their obstreperous instruments), and there wasn't a trace of the stodgy Wagnerian soup that his orchestration can become in mediocre modern-instrument performances. Sometimes, though, it felt as if Heppner and Urmana were the odd-musicians-out in this performance. They sang with the same über-vibrato they always do, relishing the chance ? for once ? to blow the orchestra out of the water with their voices rather than fighting with them. But they did not craft the love duet with the same care and attention as Rattle and his musicians. The outstanding singing was Franz-Josef Selig's King Mark, whose shattering performance of his long monologue was the emotional highlight of the evening, and which inspired the OAE to their most insightful, impassioned playing.

The lesson of the weekend is that you don't need period instruments and an expensive cast to scrub the patina off Wagner. As Longborough proves, all you need is a conductor who knows his Wagner inside-out ? well, alright, that and an opera house in your garden. Talking of which: I'm off for the rest of August to tame some plants and do some chapter writing. Enjoy a music-filled August of Proms and festivals, and see you in a few weeks.

The connection between Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is something special ? he has developed a physical language with his players

You know it when you see it. I had never experienced conductor Andris Nelsons live before yesterday's Prom with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. But the connection between him and his players is among the most special I've seen anywhere. It's always galling when the hype is right, but there really is something going on between Nelsons and the CBSO, where he's music director, an alchemy that makes the combination irresistible in concert. They put together a programme of tub-thumpers and warhorses, but Nelsons and his players gave Wagner's Rienzi Overture and Dvorak's New World Symphony an intensity and attention to detail that made both works sound new-minted. Maybe that's no surprise, since these are both Nelsons's party pieces. The Dvorak was the work he conducted with the CBSO in a private performance in Birmingham, the gig that landed him the job a couple of years ago; and he played Wagner as the opening work in the first concert he gave when he took up the position for real.

Nelsons's gestures are extreme ? from huge, hawk-like embraces of the orchestra and the occasional leap from the podium, to statue-like stasis. But this isn't narcissistic maestro-style showboating. There's a precise calibration between what he's doing and how his orchestra responds. Watching Nelsons in rehearsal, you can see how he has developed his physical language with the CBSO, how he's able to change the character of a phrase with a turn of his left hand, how he can transform the players' dynamics with an exaggerated crouch to the bottom of the conductor's stand. Above all, it's his eye contact with the whole orchestra that is the secret of Nelsons's success. He has that mysterious ability to take his hundred or so players with a single glance, ensuring the back desks of the strings and the brass feel as connected to what's happening as the leaders of the violins or cellos. And then there's the sheer joy he communicates through his smiles and facial histrionics, his invitations to the players to throw themselves into the music.

None of which would count for anything, of course, if the musical results weren't so compelling. He told the orchestra during rehearsal ? in his booming Latvian-English ? to show the audience that the CBSO is the "most passionate orchestra in UK". I think they succeeded last night. Have a listen, and/or a look, and see what you reckon. And if you've heard a more alert, intelligent, conversational, intuitive and responsive accompaniment to a Beethoven concerto, in their performance of the Second Piano Concerto with Paul Lewis, I'll eat my hat. Or possibly yours.

The Southbank Centre's MDC is only the latest niche retailer to go under. Let's go on-record for those specialists that remain

Today I need to buy some CDs in London. Nothing particularly unusual about that, apart from the sheer antediluvian unorthodoxy of being someone who still buys much of their music as an immutable, physical product. But there's a growing challenge in the metropolis. There aren't any shops. I mean "shops" in the sense of independent, enthusiast-run, locally sourced, organically certified classical music retailers ? not the pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap behemoths of HMV et al on Oxford Street.

OK, there is one ? Harold Moores on Great Marlborough Street, an oasis of sanity, good advice and expertise, where the staff are fuelled by the most important thing of all: a love for the music they're selling. There used to be others. The excellent MDC has recently closed down all of its branches as well as its online store. I remember devouring its catalogues of black labels and bootlegs as a teenager, planning purchases of dodgy Wagner recordings from unknown Italian firms and knowing the joy of total record-collector geekery. It's a real loss. The last casualty was the branch that used to be sandwiched between a Giraffe and an Eat at the Southbank Centre, a brilliantly stocked emporium that provided me with hours of happy browsing time and in which I made countless interval impulse buys that I really did need (honest). This shop is going to be replaced by yet another chain eatery of no real distinction ? just what the Southbank needs.

It's a huge shame for any visitor to the Royal Festival Hall that there's nowhere to buy a piece that has just thrilled you in concert. This cuts the umbilical connection between a decent record shop and great live music the venue has always maintained. (Thankfully the Barbican still has its own wee store, with admittedly very limited stock.) Graham Jones has written a fantastic survey of the death and the dearth of independent pop and rock record shops, and it's no surprise that the same is true for classical music. There are other exceptions to the rule, such as McAlister Matheson Music, which flourishes just down the road from the Usher Hall in Edinburgh and is the crown jewel of Scotland's classical retailers. But there are no specialist classical stores in Glasgow any more.

Where are the other holders of the classical record-shop flame across the UK? Have other major cities also been denuded of their classical emporia or are there still brave independents fighting the good fight out there? Let us know your favourite CD-hunting haunts and celebrate the survival of the independents ? while lamenting those that have gone the way of MDC.

Part-fantastical, part-biographical, Wolfgang Rihm's opera on Nietzsche premieres in Salzburg next week. Here's the score ? if you think you're hard enough ?

We all know by now that the Proms have had a pretty spectacular start (Maria João Pires playing the Chopin Nocturnes to an almost-full Royal Albert Hall in Wednesday's late-night Prom was just as magical, if not more so, than the barnstorming opening weekend of operatic excess).

But there's another festival I want to be at next week, and it's not in South Kensington. The Salzburg festival, having survived the corruption scandals of its Easter-tide cousin, and alongside the usual glamour-gigs from the Kissins, Barenboims, and Argerichs of this world, boasts a really important premiere on Tuesday. Wolfgang Rihm's opera on Nietzsche, Dionysos, is unveiled in a production directed by Pierre Audi with designs by German performance-art-polymath Jonathan Meese. This is the score I was lucky enough to see at Rihm's desk when he was composing it earlier this year. He talked me through the opera's drama, which is part-fantastical, with its mountains, lakes and dolphins, and part-biographical, in its exploration of Nietzsche's life and work.

I can't be there because of the Proms. And possibly you can't either. But don't worry, the kind people at Rihm's publisher, Universal Edition, can help us out. They've uploaded the entire vocal score of Dionysos online for our perusal ? and it's printable, too. So in lieu of the Salzburg festival, there's a chance to put on a private performance of Rihm's new opera in a London venue of our choosing. All we need are six world-class soloists, a full-strength choir, and a repetiteur of sufficient pianistic brilliance to mimic the score's vivid orchestral colouring. I reckon we can beat Ingo Metzmacher and the Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin if we get our act together. Seriously, though: it's another gesture of open-hearted democracy from the publisher, after it gave us Arvo Pärt's Fourth Symphony online, and gives you the chance to follow the score when Dionysos is broadcast by Austrian Radio, next Friday at 8.30pm. And check out the Salzburg festival's Rihm feature, Kontinent Rihm, with 15 pieces played over three weeks: an amazingly in-depth composer-feature, in the middle of one of the most conservative festivals in the world.

People are beginning to clap between movements, so perhaps change is afoot in our concert halls. Bravo!

Monday night's first normal/purely orchestral Prom of the season was a bit special: Vasily Petrenko's concert with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, with Simon Trpceski as the soloist in Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. They managed a near-ideal balance of genuine expressivity and structural power.

Petrenko also conducted Schumann's Manfred Overture in the version orchestrated by Mahler, in which the RLPO's strings sounded more sumptuous than I've heard them before. Best of all, they gave a performance of Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony that should finally make other orchestras, conductors, and programmers wake up to the fact that this is his most ambitious symphonic work, and deserves a place in the canon of late-romantic symphonism just as much as his fourth, fifth, and sixth symphonies do. iPlayer it up on Radio 3, with presentation by yours truly, and watch on BBC 2 and HD on Saturday to make up your own minds.

Something else you'll notice when you listen or watch the concert was the applause ? the genuine, unforced, generous acclaim ? that the audience gave at nearly every opportunity. That means we applauded after the first movement of the Rachmaninov, and the first two of the Tchaikovsky (there was special praise for the RLPO's leader, James Clark, whose micro-solo at the end of the Manfred Symphony's scherzo was a masterpiece of gossamer-fine musicianship).

Pace Alex Ross and the no-clap zone that he identifies in so much classical music culture, I detect a subtle change in concert manners going on at the moment. Thank all that is holy: it seems as if the fatuous snobbery of not clapping after any movement as proof of holier-than-thou cognoscenti-dom may be becoming a thing of the past. There was no hushing of the applauders from the rest of the hall, there was real pleasure on the faces of Trpceski, Petrenko and the orchestral players whenever they got a round, and a sense of interaction between musicians and listeners. The rest of the season should tell us if this is more than a one-off, but here's hoping inter-movement applause as genuine, appropriate appreciation is back on the classical music agenda.

Pianist James Rhodes's decision to use an iPad instead of sheet music sets various alarm bells ringing

It had to happen. As the press release has it, "The first classical performance using an iPad in place of traditional paper music" ? that's sheet music, to you and me ? happened on Wednesday night. Venus went into eclipse with Saturn, Orion traversed Sagittarius. Almost. Pianist James Rhodes did play Chopin's E minor Prelude off of his iPad at the Parabola arts centre, a concert that was part of the Cheltenham festival.

A couple of things ring alarm bells (you can watch the performance here and make your own mind up). First is that Rhodes didn't know the E minor Prelude off by heart anyway (a staple of the grade 5 repertory, or at least it was when I learned it, and it would only take a professional pianist about half an hour to get under his or her fingers). Second, there's a curious moment just after the climax when Rhodes makes a slip with his right hand, and then touches the iPad's screen. To mark a difficult place to remember to practise next time? To turn the page? Having told the audience that he has about 12,000 scores loaded up on his Jobs-mobile, he says all you have to do to turn a page is tap it ? but every edition of the E minor Prelude I've ever seen has the piece on one page. Curious. In any case, Rhodes plays the Prelude decorously, to rapturous applause.

Were you there? What was the remainder of this iRecital like? Oh, and as far as classical music techno-firsts go: violinist Tasmin Little would have something to say about that. Back in 2003, she played Ligeti's Violin Concerto with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic at the Proms, using a computer score and turning the pages with her feet. And there ain't no app for that. Yet.

A visionary interpreter whose ferocity and intensity gave his performances of Beethoven and Janá?ek an incendiary power

Charles Mackerras would have hated anyone eulogising about his greatness or importance. He was the least self-regarding conductor you could think of ? a musician who saw his function as serving the music, the composer and his performers, rather than his own ego. And yet that's exactly why he was such an essential force. You could describe his recent recordings with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic, and Janacek and Mozart operas at English National Opera and Covent Garden as an extraordinary Indian summer. But there was no gentle radiance here. His work blazed with coruscating brilliance to the end. No conductor had a more radical vision of Beethoven or Janacek.

Mackerras never took any received musical wisdom for granted. His ceaseless curiosity made him discover new things about repertoire: revelatory performances and recordings of Handel's music in the 1950s, Mozart's operas in the 60s, cycles of Beethoven and Brahms symphonies in later decades, even the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. And he opened our ears to music we had barely heard: above all the Czech composer Janacek, whose work he had discovered as a student in Prague in the late 1940s. It's thanks to Mackerras's painstaking work as editor, musicologist, proselytiser ? and, above all, masterly conductor ? that Janacek's operas and orchestral works now have an indelible place in the repertoire. His recordings of the operas with the Vienna Philharmonic in the 1970s and 80s still have an incendiary power. Leading a new production of The Makropulos Case at ENO in 2006, Mackerras's conducting was even more energetic, violent, hard-edged. The final scene, in which the heroine willingly accepts death, was unbearably poignant.

Although Mackerras was chief conductor at Sadler's Wells in 1970, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in his native Australia in 1982 (he had conducted the opening concert at the Sydney Opera House in 1973), and Welsh National Opera from 1987-92, he was never given the top orchestral or operatic job he deserved. Even so, in later years, the musical world caught on to what it had been missing. He became a near-constant fixture at the Edinburgh festival, and was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's conductor laureate, as well as the Philharmonia's Principal guest conductor in 2004.

If I have one defining memory of Mackerras, it is the cycle of Beethoven's symphonies that he conducted with both of these orchestras in Edinburgh in 2006. After the concluding performance of the Ninth, which pinned all of us to our chairs with its ferocity and intensity, the Usher Hall erupted in wild applause. Mackerras looked bemused ? thinking, I suspect, that it shouldn't have been for him, but for the composer. Yet that was only half true. Beethoven, like Janacek, Mozart, Brahms, and Dvorak, would surely be cheering as well. They have never had a more honest, selfless, or visionary interpreter.

Will listeners, never mind the musicians, survive as Martyn Brabbins conducts the Salomon Orchestra through all nine Beethoven symphonies in a single day?

One of the greatest achievements of western music, performed complete in concert this weekend, a chance to hear an event of such enormity of vision that any classical music lover should jump at the chance: no, not Bryn or Plácido at the Proms in Wagner or Verdi, but a soupçon of a symphony cycle at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A Beethovenathon, to be precise. With the Salomon Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins conducts all nine Beethoven symphonies in just a single Saturday, starting with the shockingly cheeky First at 11 in the morning, and progressing through four concerts to the epoch-shaking Ninth at about half seven. Assuming, of course, that his tempos don't flag, and that the musicians don't need massages, physio, or therapy by that time.

If anyone can pull the Beethovenathon off it's Brabbins and the Salomon Orchestra. They have unique form when it comes to scaling this symphonic Everest. They did all nine in a day in Cheltenham in 2003, following their Beethoven experiment with complete surveys of Tchaikovsky's and Dvorak's symphonies in subsequent seasons. Brabbins says there is an "incredible cumulative effect" to hearing the nine symphonies in chronological order, with nary a break for a Beethovenian breather. I can well believe him, but the question is how the stamina of the players and their listeners will survive nearly six hours of symphonic onslaught. We're more used to consuming culture in complete cycles and series today than ever before (we've all sat down to watch one episode of 24 and ended up slumped on the sofa hours later having got through a whole day with Jack, or started off watching a single episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and followed Larry from happiness to despair 10 shows later). But is Beethoven really ripe for the Jack Bauer treatment? Will the result be blazing Beethovenian insight or mere musical overload?

Whether Brabbins or Beethoven is the victor on Saturday, I'm looking forward to finding out. It's all in a good cause, too: money raised by the Beethovenathon goes to funding CRY, a charity that promotes awareness of cardiac risk in the young, and a new music building at Wynstones School in Gloucester.

Rumours that the conductor will make his operatic debut in 2015 may not be far-fetched, given how long he's been dreaming of it

OK, so far it's just a rumour, but it could prove to be one of the biggest opera stories of the 21st century. And that's no hint of hyperbole: Pierre Boulez is writing an opera based on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, to be premiered at La Scala in 2015. Or, rather, he might be. Charles T Downey at Ionarts picks up on the hint dropped by Renaud Machart in a bizarrely un-Boulezian context, a review of Krzysztof Warlikowski's production of Verdi's Macbeth at La Monnaie in June. Thanks to Downey for this translation of Machart's Le Monde article:

"The director decided to remove the chorus from the stage and positioned them in the theatre's highest balcony, the 'paradis' ? it worked when they were portraying the witches ? the sound thus obtained had a 'spatialised' richness, which, without requiring any electronic aid, could be of interest to Pierre Boulez for the opera that, according to our sources, he will adapt from Beckett's Waiting for Godot, planned for La Scala in Milan in 2015."

That's one of the weirdest segues from Verdi to Boulez you'll ever read, which either means Machart knows from his sources that there's real substance to the Godot rumour, or he's just stirring the gossip mill. It's certainly true that Boulez has wanted to write an opera for a while. Talking to the Telegraph in 1996, he confirms that he corresponded with the playwright Jean Genet about working together in the 1960s, as well as the German writer Heiner Müller in 1995, and that a year later he was thinking about adapting Edward Bond's plays for the opera house. None of these plans ever came to fruition. Indeed, every time I met Boulez in recent years, he always refers to writing an opera as a distant dream ? if he could ever find the time outside conducting. He must feel that any piece of music-theatre he writes will almost certainly be his only contribution to opera, as he will be 90 in 2015; Godot would be his one and only shot at operatic greatness.

The problem is, he has a lot to live up to, not least his own assessments of the state of contemporary opera: "no opera worth mentioning has been composed since 1935", "a Beatles record is certainly cleverer than a Henze opera", and operas by Berio, Birtwistle and Bernd Alois Zimmermann don't push "the frontiers of theatre, and that's the possibility that has always interested me". But let's dream the dream with Pierre and hope that he can get it together with La Scala for 2015. As Beckett puts it in Godot: "Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance!"

A jazzed-up new production of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky may be about to redeem the original score

One of John Adams's most problematic pieces has a chance of redemption at the Theatre Royal Stratford East tonight: his earthquake musical, the pop-pastiche, hybrid-opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. It's a piece that I found pretty ghastly when I first heard the CD. Listening to Adams's recording of the work, the music of Ceiling/Sky seems to fall between all of the precariously balanced stools on which it's trying to park its politically correct, cross-genre behind. Setting June Jordan's libretto, Adams has written 24 pop songs for a cast of seven characters, whose lives, lusts and losses are framed by the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. And some of it sounds, on the recording at least, embarrassing. "It's John Adams does Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder," Clark Rundell, managing director of the new Barbican/Stratford East co-production, told me. Which is fine ? it's just that the results are sometimes about as convincing as Dame Kiri doing Kylie. Added to which, Ceiling/Sky has one of the most impossibly irritating ear-worms ever written, the melody that sets the words of the title. Have a listen here, if you dare, and see how long it is before you're eating, sleeping and dreaming Adams.

But this new production could be different. For a start, director Matthew Xia and Clark Rundell spent months auditioning the right voices for the show, coming up with a team of young actors and recording artists rather than operatic warblers. And Rundell has re-thought Adams's score, releasing it from its strait-laced politeness. He's beefed up the rhythm section, and allowed his team of jazz and session musicians to make the music their own, to play real funk when Adams tries to write it, actual hip-hop when the composer gets down with the kids, and proper pop balladry when the score demands it. In rehearsals last week, the results were startling; the music didn't sound like Adams, in the best possible sense. The music actually inhabited these different genres, as well as infusing them with a new, rich complexity.

Xia's production is on a much larger scale than Peter Sellars's 1995 staging, with Adam Wiltshire's impressive designs and visuals by Tal Rosner, so the omens are pretty good, I think. Time and Michael Billington's review will tell after tonight's press night. Who knows? Maybe Adams really has written a West Side Story de nos jours. Meanwhile, here are Rundell and the band in rehearsal, and you can still listen to last week's Music Matters to hear Xia, Rundell and the cast talking about the show.

One of the most revealing classical music resources on the internet is up and running

It's not just the saving of 6 Music ? there's another good news story from the BBC today. The Proms Archive went live earlier today. OK, that may not sound like a reason for putting out the bunting, but bear with me: this is one of the most revealing resources out there on the classical music interweb. Years of work by oxygen-starved BBC minions working in digital bunkers have resulted in the details of every single Prom ever performed ? all 7,168 of them since Henry Wood first brought his baton down on a promenade concert in 1895 ? being available now for your anorak-clad pleasure. At the click of a mouse, you can instantly discover the dates, times, soloists, conductors of the seven performances so far of Mahler's Eighth Symphony (the piece that makes up this year's first night); find the debuts of your favourite artists (Claudio Abbado's was in 1967 with the London Symphony Orchestra); and if you are a Bax-ophile like me, feel that the good Lord gipped you in making you born too late in time to hear the one and only Proms performance of Bax's Sixth Symphony, in the hands of that great Baxian, John Barbirolli, a performance with the Hallé Orchestra in 1953.

As well as the statistician's joy in finding how many performances there have been of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony (56), Bruckner's Ninth (15), of Ligeti's Requiem (er, one) there's a serious side to the archive. It's a historical cross-section of how tastes have changed over more than a century of Proms-going, and how concert formats have transformed out of all recognition from what they were at the end of the 19th century. Here's a single, completely random example: compare the 16 pieces of the first night in 1897, including a duet by Emile Dunkler and a song by Angelo Mascheroni ? yes the Dunkler and Mascheroni ? ? with the single work in the opening concert 100 years later, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Of course, the Proms don't represent the whole story of how the repertoires and presentation styles of classical music have developed in this country. But they're a pretty good barometer, and the archive is the best place to go to understand how the Proms have reflected and shaped our cultural lives down the decades. It's also the essential answer to those nagging post-Prom pub arguments about when Messiaen's Transfiguration was first done (1970), whether Herbert von Karajan ever appeared at the Proms (he did, once, in 1973), and the relative curliness of Simon Rattle's hair since his first Prom with the London Sinfonietta in 1976 to his most recent with the Berlin Philharmonic a couple of years ago. Actually, I made that last one up. But for everything else, the archive is the oracle.

Brydon deserves a resounding fanfare for his contribution to classical music in Scotland ? and he had none of the pretensions of more famous conductors

Conductor Roderick Brydon, one of the unsung heroes of Scottish musical life, died last week. The list of his achievements shows just how crucial he was for Scotland's music over the past few decades. Brydon was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's first principal conductor and artistic director, he was one of the guiding lights of Scottish Opera's early history, and became a major figure on the international stage, especially in Australia and Switzerland, where he was in charge of the opera houses of Lucerne and Berne, as well as guest conducting in opera houses from Los Angeles to Covent Garden.

As Conrad Wilson says in his obituary in the Glasgow Herald, it was Brydon's advocacy of Britten's operas that made him so important in the 1960s and 70s. He did as much as anyone to establish works such as The Turn of the Screw and Albert Herring in the repertoire, his performances inspired by a deep love of the music and a close working relationship with the composer.

So why wasn't Roddy more feted towards the end of his life? A combination of ill-health and changed personal circumstances conspired to make him a rare guest on Scotland's podiums in his last years. His final public appearance was with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, six years ago in an evening of Viennese bonbons.

I only met Roddy in 2008 at a dinner for the Preshal Trust, a charity set up by my father and May Nicholson that works for underprivileged families and communities in Govan, Glasgow. I got talking to the man sitting next to me, who asked me courteously about my musical background, and he said that he worked in classical music too. We got on the subject of Wagner's Parsifal, when he told me he had conducted the opera in Switzerland. It's one thing to "work in" classical music ? but quite another to have conducted one of the greatest pieces of music ever written in a major European opera house. I immediately felt a right eejit for having discoursed at length on having seen Parsifal in Bayreuth, in front of someone who had actually conducted it. It was only as we talked that I realised exactly who I was talking to: too young to have seen him in his heyday with the SCO or Scottish Opera, I simply hadn't recognised Roddy. His modesty masked his huge importance in Scotland's classical musical culture. There isn't enough of a recorded legacy of his work or on YouTube, but Roddy deserves an enduring and grateful fanfare for his life in music, and his generosity of spirit.

Following in the footsteps of Plato and his Pythagorean undertones, composers have, over the centuries, used their own codes for the cognoscenti to decipher

Julian Baggini's report this week, on the 12-note scales and assorted musico-mathematical symbology recently discovered in Plato's manuscripts, was fascinating. If historian Jay Kennedy is right, Plato structured his writings according to a Pythagorean division of the octave into 12 tones. At the largest scale, many of the dialogues have total numbers of lines that are multiples of 12. Dividing whole texts by 12, Kennedy found "positive concepts" in the dialogues coinciding with harmonious intervals of Pythagoras's scale, and negative concepts at dissonant intervals.

Why did Plato go to these lengths to base his writings on hidden Pythagorean foundations? The real importance of this discovery, as Kennedy says, is that it allies Plato with the heretical, Pythagorean idea that "mathematical law governed the universe and not Zeus". It's a clandestine code that ties Plato's work to the scientific arcana of music as it was understood by the ancient Greeks. And it may result in philosophers interpreting his writing as much as symbol as literal. As Kennedy says, "if you worked hard and became wise, you could understand the symbols and penetrate his text to his underlying philosophy".

That means, in other words, treating Plato's philosophy as if it were a piece of music ? after all, music's lack of literal meaning requires that we interpret it symbolically if we want to find out what's going on underneath the surface. But there's an even more obvious musical connection with Plato's Pythagorean secret. Over the centuries, composers have used many kinds of code for cognoscenti to decipher, for posterity to ponder, or as a secret language for their lovers to treasure. So here's a handful of musical code-makers and breakers, some of Plato's and Pythagoras's heirs.

Bach

Much of his late music is structured according to principles of numerology and abstract musical laws: any and all of The Goldberg Variations, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, and the Mass in B Minor. If you really want your fill of Bach and numerology, see if you can track down Wilfred Mellers's Bach and the Dance of God, a book that stretches numero-musicology (to coin an academic discipline) to breaking point ? and beyond.

Schumann

From the Abegg Variations to the Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, Robert was obsessed with musical ciphers and symbols. Musicologist Eric Sams covers the ground here.

Schoenberg

The whole project of serialism, his Method of Composing With 12 Tones, is a numerologist's dream. With all of those 12s in his life, maybe it's only natural that Schoenberg was a triskaidekaphobe, terrified of the number 13. With the greatest possible irony, he died on Friday 13 July 1951.

Berg

His Lyric Suite for String Quartet is full of the symbological significance of the numbers 23 and 10, representing the entwining of he and his lover, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. He used their initials translated into musical notation, too: H (B natural in German nomenclature), F, A and B (B flat).

Peter Maxwell Davies

Max has used mathematical magic squares in his music for decades, employing them to generate the proportions of his pieces and the notes he uses.

John Zorn

Zorn has taken his music on a numerological and symbolical journey into the occult in recent years with albums such as IAO: Music in Sacred Light or the barnstorming Six Litanies for Heliogabalus.

A new study finds that both western music and western speech use the interval of a minor third to communicate sadness. But which used it first?

New evidence for a musical phenomenon we've taken for granted for centuries: that the minor key is sadder than the major. Dido's Lament is audibly bleaker than Kylie's I Should Be So Lucky' ? although neither are as sad as the doleful monotone of the vuvuzelas that blared out from Bloemfontein on Sunday. A scientist in Massachusetts thinks she's discovered a link between the interval of a minor third (C major to E flat, say) and expressions of sadness in human speech. Meagan Curtis found in her study that the speech-melodies of actors' voices (the movement of pitch in their intonation) happened to encompass a minor third when they were asked to communicate sadness. And when listeners were played the same speech-melodies, shorn of the words, they accurately interpreted the actors' emotion.

So which came first, the sad minor third in music or the sad minor third in speech? Have centuries of music in minor keys conditioned us to the sound of sadness, or has music through the ages drawn from the cadences of our speech and heightened its emotional power? There is another question, too: given that we can only hear a minor third as sad if we imagine the harmonic context around it (as an interval, it's the top half of a "happy" major triad, and is part of all major scales as well; D?F and A?C in C major, for example), is this phenomenon limited to western musical cultures and harmonic systems? Other languages and other musical cultures will surely have different expressions for emotional intensity ? something Curtis's study can't tell us, as her sample was limited to American English. Besides which, the use of the minor key in any song or symphony is only one way to communicate sadness.

I think what Curtis has discovered is more to do with learned behaviour than the revelation of a universal cultural or musical truth. Tangential evidence for how nurture, rather than nature, forms our collective musical brains and ears comes from 18th-century mathematician Robert Smith, quoted in Ross Duffin's mind-opening book How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care). Smith is talking about something else we now take completely for granted (it's in the way pianos are tuned, and the way we hear most music today): the division of the octave into 12 equal semitones. Here's Smith, writing in 1759:

The octave being always divided into five tones and two limmas [diatonic semitones]; by increasing the tones equally ? the difference between the major and minor limma will be contracted to nothing, which ? annihilates all the false consonances. But the harmony in this system of 12 semitones is extremely coarse and disagreeable.

To his ears, maybe. But we've become used to it over the past two and a half centuries, for better or worse. I bet Smith heard a minor third differently from us, too.

El Sistema is a wonderful project, but it mustn't blind us to the great work happening on our doorstep ? music education and social harmony have always gone hand in hand

Let me first make one thing clear: I have nothing against the work the Big Noise in Raploch is doing with Sistema Scotland, or the music that the El Sistema-inspired In Harmony pilot schemes are performing in England. Each project is doing some fantastic work in its community. I do, however, have to pick up on a couple of points Richard Holloway made in Lesley Riddoch's Radio 4 documentary on Sunday, a programme to which I also contributed.

Holloway is the chair of Sistema Scotland and former chair of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC). He claimed on the documentary that El Sistema in Venezuela turns conventional music education on its head by fostering group tuition rather than one-on-one lessons. The resulting emphasis on "collegiality and mutual discipline", he said, is not found elsewhere in music. I think he is wrong. Group-based music-making, both vocal and instrumental, is a staple of (good) musical education in schools across Britain, and has been used by our 150-or-so music services and Local Education Authorities everywhere from Wick to Whitstable since the 1950s. There are also any number of international precedents, such as the Kodály method in Hungary and the Suzuki in Japan, which have used communal playing and singing as a way of achieving musical competence ? and social harmony ? for years.

Holloway implied that El Sistema is less competitive than conventional models of music education because it involves whole classes and ? uniquely, according to Holloway ? believes "every child has music in them". To my mind, he's either wildly misinformed or he has never taken part in a decent music lesson in school. Every good music teacher in this country wants to create a sustaining, non-exclusive atmosphere in which children can express their creativity through music; El Sistema does not have sole access to that ideal. It's bizarre, even insulting, to say that previous generations of music educators had any motivation other than the nurturing of each child's potential.

A further implication of Holloway's was that El Sistema works because it's a non-elitist approach to music education. That, too, is wrong. Just like any coherent music-education programme, the idea is to give as many children as possible access to music but as and when they show real talent they are given the opportunity to be part of El Sistema's blue-riband ensembles ? for which competition is intense and fierce, just as it is for the National Youth orchestras of Scotland and Great Britain.

Holloway also seemed relaxed about the idea of Sistema Scotland diverting funds from other musical and social schemes in the country: "I sympathise with people who think there's this new, sexy kid on the block who's going to mop up all the money out there. What I say is: you're doing wonderful stuff, but you ain't doing this, brother ? I sympathise with you, but take that up with the culture bosses." Richard, brother, if you ain't a "culture boss" in Scotland, I don't know who is.

Holloway appears to believe that no other scheme puts social transformation first, and music second. As the documentary showed, that also isn't true. The Big Project in Broomhouse, Edinburgh, for one example, has been doing precisely that for the past eight years. My point is that all music education ? across all genres ? is never just about technical excellence as opposed to social responsibility. To learn about collective, collaborative music-making is also to learn about social interaction and responsibility. I'm like a broken record with this message, so apologies if you've heard it a few times before: El Sistema is wonderful, but the huge publicity its British manifestations garner must not blind us to the work that is already happening on our doorstep, the often miraculous work that our music teachers and youth ensembles do on a daily basis. Yes, there isn't enough of it (and it's essential right now that we hold the Tories to their manifesto commitments on music education), but yet again the solution is obvious and straightforward: what we need to do is make the work of the Music Services free to all of our schoolchildren, from the moment a child first picks up an instrument or sings together in class, to their membership of a youth orchestra or choir.

Richard Holloway is a powerful advocate of El Sistema. But he could be even more effective in his advocacy of music education in general if he understood the work that has been happening in Scotland and the rest of Britain for decades ? so much of it unheralded, unpromoted, unpublicised ? and if he put his weight behind promoting the whole sector, not just one tiny part of it.