The Youth of Today are getting a bad press of late, particularly if, as we do, you live in a leafy part of North London worryingly close to some of the more gang-ridden areas.

So last night's prizegiving concert at Junior Trinity in the rather splendid setting of St John's Church, Waterloo, was a thoroughly heartwarming experience.

The last couple of days have seen a healthy debate on the Guardian's pages on the subject of modern classical music - love it or hate it (see Joe Queenan's article and Tom Service's blog).

Since we have a large database of concerts here - we believe we now have the highest coverage of top quality concerts worldwide of any concert finder on the web - we thought we'd inform the debate with a few statistics.

We decided to give the kids a taste of opera, and took them to the Magic Flute at London's Opera Holland Park yesterday afternoon. Very successful: the production was well enjoyed by all. In contrast to some of the critics, we thought there was lots of humour and fun in the production and staging, and thoroughly enjoyed the music. The combination of a pantomime-like plot and some of Mozart's most sublime music makes Die Zauberflöte very appealing to kids, and a great time was had.

Opera, witches, werewolves, trolls etc are an unlikely mix, but are brewed up and served beautifully in Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, which was brought home from my son's school library and avidly lapped up. (It was published in 1995)

Pratchett isn't everyone's cup of tea - you have to share his anarchic and pythonesque (verging on the batty) sense of humour, and enjoy, or at least put up with, the continual spoofing of by-now-conventional fantasy themes. It helps if you have got to know the standard Discworld characters: the housewife-and-mother-and-witch Granny Ogg, Death (who ALWAYS SPEAKS IN UPPER CASE), etc. If you're generally in sync with all this, he's side-splittingly funny.

Spohr, Rolla and Kalliwoda are not names which trip immediately off the tongue, and yet all were famous violin virtuosi of their day. In a new CD, Vaughan Jones and Riad Chibah are exploring lesser known repertoire at the same time as exploring a less frequently used form: the violin and viola duo.

The form presents serious challenges for the composer. Unlike a solo piece, the duo cannot be a simple demonstration of an individual's virtuosity: rather, the musical range of a concerto or piano piece must be filled with just two instruments, neither of which, other than the occasional double-stop, can play chords.

A shiny new glass and steel office block next to a major railway station might not seem like an obvious concert venue. But that's precisely what developer Peter Millican has attempted with the new Kings Place development, and it looks like he's pulled it off.

Kings Place is otherwise a nicely designed office building, done in the current style with a tall atrium and backing attractively onto the canal (the less said the better about the urban landscape of Kings Cross station at the front). You simply don't expect to find an art gallery and a 460-seat concert hall inside.

Having been completely blown away by Gustavo Dudamel's performance of the Shostakovich fifth Symphony (see the review), I was on the lookout to see what other critics made of him. The answer is surprisingly polarised.

In the Evening Standard, Barry Millington was as enthused as me (and the audience) by the “high-octane performance”:

On Tuesday I attended two: a school's concert organised by Cavatina Trust with the Carducci Quartet in the morning and a crossover event with Stringfever at the Bloomsbury Theatre in the evening. They were very different events, but both could legitimately claim to be bringing classical music to a new, and young audience.

Tuesday 5th June, 2008

When Shostakovich wrote his Symphony no.5 in D minor in 1937, he was literally writing for his life. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, had just excited a deluge of vitriol from Stalin, and Shostakovich only escaped arrest and deportation because the official allocated the task was himself purged the night before.

The air of expectation was tangible at the Opéra Bastille in Paris on Monday night as the curtain went up on the second scene to reveal Anna Netrebko, dressed in a long white dress to play Juliet in Bellini's “I Capuleti e I Montecchi” (Capulets and Montagues)..