Around the world

The West has had a dose of the international recently. Sex-and-the-City actress Kim Catrall and one-time Mr Darcy Matthew Macfayden brought bubble and fizz to Noel Coward's Private Lives over in Bath – you can now see the classic whirl of love, coincidence and mishaps on stage in the Vaudeville Theatre in London, where it's getting pretty top-notch reviews. The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, joined by fellow writer Greg Milner, entertained an audience at St George's with a conversation about the history of recorded music - what exactly is a recording, and what do we think it should be? Ross followed up his Bristol appearance with a stint at the Wigmore Hall in London, where he delivered a talk about the future of the classical concert. That's an oh-so-lovely link to the third international figure being welcomed to the West: tomorrow night American composer John Adams will be conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Britten, Sibelius and his Dr Atomic Symphony, and one of the first handful of European performances of his 2009 City Noir. This 30-minute piece ends thus, in Adams's words. 'The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of a David Lynch film—the kind who only come out very late on a very hot night.'