Royal Albert Hall, London
The Austrian legends glided through Mozart and Tchaikovsky but found grand and powerful direction in Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony

Taking the big-shot orchestra slot in the final week of the Proms, the Vienna Philharmonic proved its credentials in two concerts covering the staging posts from classical to modernist. The conductor Franz Welser-Möst barely needed to break a sweat to draw out impeccably polished string sound and top-notch wind and brass solos. No surprises there. But might a few surprises, a few experiments, have made it more memorable?

For all the pleasures of these performances, the cumulative effect was of safety and good taste – words not usually applied to Berg’s Lulu Suite, three movements of which began the first concert. The strings and flute sent their tendrils out tenderly and silkily; the blend when the rest joined in was seamless. The intrusion of low brass near the end of the first movement and a moment of barrel-organ brightness in the second briefly ruffled the surface, but you wouldn’t have guessed the anguish of the Lulu story from this.

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When four Californian pre-teens made an album together it was just one of many creative adventures and quickly set aside, but its reputation as naive avant pop has quietly grown. Still friends, the band explain their odd rebirth

Like an outsider art version of Sugababes, or kids singing over Depeche Mode ringtones, there’s something both familiar and odd about Summer 2000 by X-Cetra. Recorded by four preteens in Y2K California, the album distils sleepovers, crushes and butterfly clips into 11 tracks of bedroom pop and Windows 95 R&B, equal parts carefree and gravely serious.

Only 20 CD-R copies were ever made. But a still-unknown person posted one of them online in 2001, and by 2020 the girls – now women – were astonished to find it being discussed on muso forum Rate Your Music. “Pure creative expression of these preteen best friends who love each other and wanted to make art together, and that’s so beautiful,” says one user there; “Definitely on the poppier side of ‘accidentally avant garde music made by children’,” says another.

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A viral debut made her the next big thing, but rather than repeat herself, she’s followed her heart. The New Yorker talks about the virtues of indie label life, and how her latest record takes on the ‘girl violence’ she sees in lesbian communities

Mikaela Strauss, the songwriter and producer who records as King Princess, describes her new album Girl Violence as “almost like a ‘ha ha’ to toxic masculinity”, although not in the way you may initially think. Informed by the drama and infighting that she suggests is inherent in many lesbian communities, Girl Violence touches on the idea that “in a world full of physical violence and anger and war and hypermasculinity, this is the really crazy violence that’s under the surface, that’s subliminal and emotional and thoughtful”, she says. She smirks a little, over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn: “You think that you’re the proprietor of the violence. [But] it’s the girls.”

Girl Violence is the third King Princess album, and the most fully formed. It represents something of a clean break for 26-year-old Strauss, who went viral aged 19 with her debut single 1950, a plush but covertly bitter anthem about a complex queer romance. That single, released on Mark Ronson’s Sony imprint Zelig, broke through to the US charts and established Strauss as a pop sensation in waiting.

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Lo-fi animation mixed with archive footage and home movies tell the story of a group of talented young mates from the Wirral with an eccentric, unpretentious charm

Remember the Coral? These youthful rockers brightened up the early 00s music scene with their melodic mix of 60s Merseybeat and off-kilter psychedelia, before seemingly melting back into obscurity. In truth, they’re not really prime rockumentary material – they were never particularly huge in terms of either popularity or personal drama – but this film playfully captures the spirit of a bunch of talented young mates who just wanted to play in a band, and got their wish.

Founding members James Skelly, his brother Ian, Paul Duffy, Bill Ryder-Jones and Lee Southall were all working-class kids growing up on the Wirral, between Liverpool and Wales, goofing around, living in their own world. “Probably the first incarnation of the band was a ghost-hunting business,” says Skelly. By their teens, they were playing guitars, smoking weed and studying pop music more than school; not just the classics – Beatles, Kinks, Small Faces, this hot new band called Oasis – but also leftfield stuff like Captain Beefheart, close-harmony vocal groups from the 1950s, even the Coronation Street theme tune.

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Enter the Tapocalypse as Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Rob Reiner return in a still-funny, cameo-studded telling of the hapless band’s final gig

Legendary faux rockers Spinal Tap, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as, respectively, lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, lead singer David St Hubbins and bassist Derek Smalls, return in a cameo-studded rockusequel – or, if you will, mockusequel – about the band’s contractually enforced and horribly ill-fated one-off reunion gig in New Orleans. It’s their first time playing together since a mysterious reported row between David and Nigel in 2009 brought the Tap bandwagon to a halt.

And to paraphrase the Smiths: that joke is still funny … it’s not too close to home and it’s not too near the bone … but it is close, and you might have to work a little bit harder to remember how you felt the first time you saw the original. There’s lots of good stuff here, some witty reboots and reworkings of gags from the first film and sprightly update appearances from minor, half-forgotten characters currently residing in the “where-are-they-now?” file. (It’s sad not to see Anjelica Huston as Stonehenge designer Polly Deutsch, however.) And the single biggest laugh is a line right at the end about Bruce Springsteen.

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Powerful French film that inspired Casablanca stars Gabin as a holed-up gangster in Algiers lured to his doom by infatuation

Julien Duvivier’s mysterious and passionately despairing 1937 movie is rereleased, with its luminous lead performance from Jean Gabin as a charismatic Parisian criminal hiding out in the labyrinthine Casbah of Algiers; he is protected there by the dense polyglot population of Indigenous locals that the French colonial authorities consider it imprudent to provoke. He is effectively given sanctuary, but also imprisoned in the unpoliceable, unknowable quarter that, like Polanski’s Chinatown, is a place that baffles and thwarts the imperial powers-that-be.

It was a film remade by Hollywood in 1938 as Algiers, which was the debut of Hedy Lamarr and made a huge star of its French lead Charles Boyer, who is much sleeker and more conventionally photogenic than Gabin (but forever stuck with the misquoted line: “Come with me to the Casbah…!” always being purred by nightclub comedians). Algiers in turn inspired Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, so these crooks, thieves, perspiring cynics and romantic stoics, all going slowly stir-crazy in the exotic, orientalised underbelly of north Africa, can all be traced back to Pépé le Moko. (Marcel Dalio, who played Casablanca’s croupier, is in Pépé le Moko as the slippery snitch L’Arbi.) It is a film of intense poetry; translated into the American context, the story looked noir-ish in ways that aren’t in the original.

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Adele Thomas and Sarah Crabtree took up their positions as joint heads of WNO in January after brutal funding cuts. But they are confident their pared-down operation will still offer ‘an electric night out’

‘I’ve got to say this straight off the bat,” says the director Adele Thomas. “I was expecting this company, given what they’ve been through, to all have their arms crossed and to just not want to know. And actually, they’ve been so unbelievably welcoming. And that’s been a saving grace whenever we’ve turned around and it’s looked like there’s another bin on fire.”

Thomas is one half of Welsh National Opera’s new leadership team along with Sarah Crabtree, and since starting the job in January they haven’t been short of fires to put out. We first talked in April, days after they had given an impassioned speech at the curtain call of the company’s first night of Britten’s Peter Grimes, with more than 100 performers and staff behind them on stage. Four months of graft later, the planned autumn productions of Puccini’s Tosca and Bernstein’s Candide are on their way, and the 2026-27 season – Thomas and Crabtree’s first as programmers – is in place (details will be announced next March). The funding situation remains bleak, and yet finally there is a sense that, after three years of bad news, the company may be able to look to the future.

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Tycoon who briefly surpassed Elon Musk is a friend of Trump, owner of Hawaii island and father of man who took over CBS

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of software company Oracle, is having a good year. His friend Donald Trump is in the White House, his son David Ellison has taken over the storied media company CBS, and on Wednesday he surpassed his buddy Elon Musk to win the title of the “world’s richest man”.

Oracle’s stock went wild with the news, pushing his fortune even higher. Ellison’s net worth shot up to $393bn, surpassing Musk’s $384bn – although, by the time markets closed on Wednesday, Musk was back ahead.

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