Once again Gavin Bryars confounds many of our expectations with his laid-back take on the world's dramas. The War in Heaven (1992) featured a serene counter-tenor and is anything but bellicose. In The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), performed as a companion-piece in this concert, Bryars's band appropriately plays on undisturbed by the ship sundering all around it. The central drama of Dr Ox's Experiment (1997) is one of celebrating stasis. And so it is that Bryars's latest work From Egil's Saga (2004), a setting of battle-hardened texts by the 13th-century Icelandic poet and warrior Snorri Sturuson, has that calm, quiet, lamenting detachment – ‘a portrait of Egil at the end of his days’, as the composer has characterized it. Once again the world is seen through a piece of interestingly darkened glass.

Listening to Luigi Ferrari, the Wexford Opera Festival's outgoing Artistic Director, one cannot understand why many of the rare operas Wexford is famous for reviving are not staples of an often rather repetitive repertoire. Perhaps their problem is that, to a degree, they require an audience to think, rather than merely emote. That was Wagner's problem.

1. Deptford and South Bank Centre: Two Scottish Piano Concertos

2. Bristol: John Pickard's Violin Sonata

3. Wigmore Hall: Nordheim's ‘Five Stages for Four’

Cecilia McDowall is noted for her ‘practical’ approach to composing choral music to suit the needs and capabilities of local amateur choirs, and she has a growing association with several, notably the St Albans Choral Society, by whom she was commissioned to write a new setting of the Stabat Mater, which duly received its world première in St Albans on 23 October 2004. It was written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of St Albans Choral Society, and they duly rose to the occasion lustily in fine spirits.