In a world of instant musical gratification, where tunes from any genre or artist are available at the click of a mouse, can classical music remain relevant to the digital generation?

There is no doubt that live-in-HD versions of Metropolitan Opera performances have been a signal success, both at the box office of the international theaters in which they are shown, and in the opinion of many operagoers.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music, said he could not bear dining to an accompaniment of “idiotic pop” and left without eating. The walk-out is his latest stand in a campaign to have piped “muzak” banned from restaurants, hotels and shops.

The Observer’s classical music critic looks back on a good year for Mahler, opera at the movies and legends of the past on YouTube.

Avant garde art and architecture are loved, but in music we cling to the past. We’re missing out.

Every day I pass through Toronto’s Bathurst Street Subway Station, on the way to work. And sometimes, on days when I’m not running late, I pause to listen to the classical music that the Toronto Transit Commission pipes into the station. But as much as I enjoy being gently eased into my working day with a Mozart symphony or a Vivaldi concerto, I’m well aware that the TTC isn’t really trying to gratify my particular musical tastes. There are other motives at work here.

When the Imperial Symphony Orchestra begins its new season Tuesday, the program for its first concert will rely on a bit of a marketing gimmick. Called “Pleading the 5th on the 5th,” the orchestra will play excerpts from works with the number five, including the first movement of the most famous “fifth” of all, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, with its instantly recognizable four-note opening.

There is a lot of expectation about the new theater being built in Miami for the New World Symphony, it is planned to be inaugurated by October 2010.

One of Britain’s leading composers is calling on fellow classical musicians to abandon the stuffy conventions that surround the concert hall and to adopt new and “blasphemous” ideas, such as amplifying the sound.

Rob Garner really, really wants a set of timpani.