Moon and Star, commissioned for the 1995 Proms, is returning there next Wednesday. It's a piece about gazing at the sky, and was partly inspired by sitting in the Albert Hall and staring at its ceiling, which in those days appeared to have little star-like tears in its fabric (I recall being asked not to mention this in the BBC Radio 3 pre-concert interview I took part in.) This very large-scale chorus and orchestra piece has been regularly performed every now and again. A

This rather beautiful interior was the venue for a performance of STORM given last weekend by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and a choir of 500 amateur singers from all over Bavaria, conducted by Simon Rattle. It's a permanent circus building, the Circus Krone-Bau in Munich, but with a high wooden roof above a lowly raked circular auditorium, giving a clear, warm acoustic. I wrote STORM thirty years ago for the newly-founded CBSO youth choirs, so it was wonderful, an

Warmest congratulations to everyone at Spitalfields Music Festival for producing the 50th edition this week. In the past, particularly in the 90s and 00s, I've been intensely involved in the festival in the past as an artistic director and later as a trustee. My first visit to a Spitalfields concert, in its original and immortal venue of Christ Church Spitalfields, was probably forty years ago. Summarising my memories of this long period would be an impossible task. Suffice