The music of Louis Andriessen is instantly recognisable but frustratingly difficult to define. The American Minimalists are a strong influence, but so too is Stravinsky, and through him, Bach. Those figures provide the context for Andriessen’s works in the Barbican mini-festival M is for Man, Music and Mystery, which this Britten Sinfonia concert inaugurated. The connections proved strong – in this case with Steve Reich – even if they did little to counter the image of Andriessen as a radical and utterly unique voice.

The nature of Europe, its administration, institutions and its porousness are hot topics. Sectors of Britain’s media and political class hyperventilate over trumped-up concerns while real issues which are just about impossible to address remain unresolved. In this climate, the European Border Breakers Awards are ripe for misinterpretation. Instead of being for those devising the shrewdest ways to slip in and out of countries, they are an annual European Union-sponsored award presented to pop musicians achieving success beyond their own borders.

Jaap van Zweden is going places. At 55, he is already 16 years into a second high-profile musical career. His first, as a violinist, saw him appointed leader of the Concertgebouw, the youngest ever to hold the position. From there, he moved to the conductor’s podium, and is now Music Director of the Dallas Symphony and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. According to some rumours, he is also under serious consideration for the New York Philharmonic.

Caro Emerald first appears, spotlit, in one of the aisles of the Brighton Centre’s eastern balcony. Clad in a pleated knee-length black skirt and an eye-jarring yellow and red shirt that brings to mind Russian expressionist art, she kicks things off with the doleful, show tune-style paean to being a mistress, “The Other Woman”. It is a striking beginning and her concert grips the capacity audience by the scruff of the neck from thereon in.

What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. It’s true that there are a handful of other artists with that charisma, but none so rare as Vermeer. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only the subject of a recent novel and a film, but also a kind of poster for Holland as a whole, and the star of the recently reopened Mauritshaus in the Hague. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can hardly see the handful of Vermeers for the crowds.

The title Tape Hiss instantly telegraphs a dissatisfaction with today’s digital world and, fittingly, the all-analogue second album from Rotterdam’s Rats on Rafts could soundtrack a half-remembered Eighties evening taking in a bill of Britain and New Zealand’s most singular post-punk survivors. Their musical inspirations ring through loud and clear. But – and it's a massive but – these Lownlanders do it better and more ferociously than any of their forebears.

“My brother died.” That’s the reality New York-based banker Willem struggles to inhabit when he returns to his estranged family in Amsterdam. There is no sense in Pauli’s loss – a sudden heart attack at 20, cradled by a stranger in the street – nor finality. Willem’s response is to continue the conversation through an elegiac series of letters, countering the abandonment and searching for meaning in both a life interrupted and his own isolated existence.

It’s a brilliantly sunny January afternoon amidst a general drama of rain at an industrial park outside Aix-en-Provence, and members of a production team are gathering for the first time in the back yard of the festival’s rehearsal studios. Some have met earlier, and three of the five singers who’ll be arriving shortly know each other thanks to the connections already made through the European Network of Opera Academies.

From fulsome, modally inflected string lines (“Sintra”) to the funkiest of New Orleans brass grooves (“Atchafalaya”), this first major label album from Grammy-winning, NYC-based collective Snarky Puppy, paired here with Holland's crack Metropole Orkest under their principal conductor Jules Buckley, is a brilliantly arranged and artfully executed tour de force.

There’s no shame in being a jobbing actor, but you can’t help missing the Anthony Hopkins who dissected repression with definitive, painful finesse, back when he was great. The Human Stain (2003) is the last I’ve seen of that, amongst the last decade’s Norse gods, Greek generals and judges. His turn as kidnapped lager tycoon Freddy Heineken resembles one of Larry Olivier’s later, international pay-cheques – as a project if not role, Wild Geese 2 comes unwelcomely to mind.