The French composer Henri Dutilleux has died aged 97 in Paris. Born in Angers in 1916, Dutilleux became one of the most prominent figures within contemporary French music. Shirking the nomenclature and orthodoxy of any particular school, his music embraced a wide range of ideas and influences, visual, literary and musical – not least those of his compatriots Baudelaire and Proust. An exquisite craftsman, with a strong eye on the calligraphic element of his music, Dutilleux recently found a keen advocate in soprano Barbara Hannigan, who lately recorded his song cycle Correspondances.

I admit it. I went to see The Great Gatsby with a critique already in mind. So I was surprised to find the film did not entirely live down to my expectations. Yes, Baz Luhrmann is meretricious, grossly untouching and obsessed with his own product rather than the story he is telling. But beneath the metre-thick veneer of this new film there are strong performances and a well-written screenplay desperate to get out.

Has there ever been a composer who has demanded or achieved more? Expanding time, harmony and philosophy, changing the way in which music is performed, attempting (if debatably) to harness the symphonic to the dramatic, trying (more successfully though troublingly) to wed politics to the opera house and triggering love and loathing for his work in dizzyingly polarised terms.

Antonio Pappano is a resolutely theatrical conductor. There's no denying that the hours spent in the orchestra pit have coloured the way he conducts in the concert hall. And it's a great thing, though he has to pick his repertoire carefully; Pappano is not for all markets. This week he and the LSO really found their niche, bringing fire to Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and Lutosławski with performances demanding high virtuosity, which the LSO delivered without hesitation.

What always draws be back to Hebel is the completely coincidental fact that my grandfather, whose use of language was in many ways reminiscent of that of the Hausfreund, would every year buy a Kempter Calender, in which he would note, in his indelible pencil, the name days of his relatives and friends, the first frost, the first snowfall, the onset of the Föhn, thunderstorms, hailstorms and suchlike, and also, on the pages left blank for notes, the occasional recipe for Wermuth or for gentian sc

Wozzeck is a relentlessly chilling opera. But in English National Opera's incisive new production, the piece shocks afresh. Carrie Cracknell makes an impressive operatic debut with her no-holds-barred look at the workings of the mind of Wozzeck, a squaddie back from the Middle East. Cracknell reveals a perspicacious political message that honours rather than overrides Berg's multifaceted score, which is delivered with equally grim vigour by the cast, Edward Gardner and the Orchestra of ENO.

Today the British Psychological Society's division of clinical psychology (DCP) issued a statement about the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), in which the BPS has expressed concern that 'psychiatric diagnosis is often presented as an objective statement of fact, but is, in essence, a clinical judgment based on observation and interpretation of behaviour and self-report, and thus subject to variation and bias'.

I've just been reminded by the Royal Opera House Twitter feed that today is Massenet's birthday. Much as I love Manon and Werther, I think he's a little misrepresented by their ubiquity in today's repertoire. Much better (and considerably more fun) is his sexy 1905 comédie chantée Chérubin (which the ROH produced in 1994 and seen at the Royal Academy last year). I first got to know the work through an RCA recording with Federica von Stade in the title role.

The forthcoming Aldeburgh Festival features an on-beach performance of Peter Grimes, which 'places the audience directly in its setting'. It's a great (if pricey) idea, bringing Britten out of the opera house and back to the locale that inspired the composer. In effect it was George Crabbe's vision of Suffolk that brought Britten back to Britain in 1942. But there's a bit of confusion about where Grimes is actually set and the festival marketing materials are glossing over a few details.

Gatsby's excess - his house, his clothes, his celebrity guests-is designed to win over his beloved Daisy. Luhrmann's vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he's less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

Thus spake David Denby in The New Yorker about the new adaptation of The Great Gatsby. But then, I sort of told you so when the trailer for Baz Luhrmann's latest offering appeared nearly a year ago.
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