John Lennon’s hit singles had been made with his wife, Yoko Ono, and the Plastic Ono Band.However, the record’s success was tarnished after it was first released, because Harrison lost a case in which he was sued for plagiarism by the publishers of the Chiffons’ 1964 hit “He’s So Fine”, and had to pay $1.6m (£1.1m) compensation. Harrison had only seven more top 10 hits, the biggest of which was “Got My Mind Set On You” which reached number two in 1987.His widow, Olivia, and son, Dhani, 23, agreed to the single being re-released by EMI after strong public demand, but insisted the cash went to a fund administered by the Material World Charitable Foundation.A spokesman for EMI said: “We are very happy that the reissue of ‘My Sweet Lord’ continues to spread George Harrison’s music and message around the world. It’s especially appropriate that the Material World Charitable Foundation, a charity that George set up some time ago, will benefit from the profits.”Other charities that will benefit are Jubilee Action, BBC Children In Need, Macmillan Nurses, M?cins Sans Fronti?s and the National Deaf Children’s Society.. If Pink Floyd’s guitarist David Gilmour should bear more resemblance to a country GP considering retirement to his holiday home than a fantastically wealthy rock star, then it’s hardly surprising.

Quite wonderfully, Gilmour recently sold his rarely occupied London home for several million pounds (reportedly to Earl Spencer, no less), and is in the process of donating the whole whack to a charity for the homeless. But then, he is the man who, troubled by his good fortune, once admitted to rushing off a few cheques to good causes each day (which would have made a fine white blues song – “Woke up this morning, wrote a cheque to charidee…” and so on.).Unsurprisingly, he cuts a benign figure on stage, as he leads a large band, including a nine-piece choir, none of whom are likely to appear on Pop Idol anytime soon, through a crowd-pleasing collection of some of his best known works, and some more recent offerings from the late Floyd catalogue. If innovation is what you crave, this is not the place.
“Shine on You Crazy Diamond” bookends the set, the first acoustic version sounding like a man avoiding his dinner party guests by noodling on an acoustic in the kitchen until he finds what he’s been struggling to place (cue whoops from the middle-aged crowd), but, overworn by familiarity, much of the performance, especially the numbers from the Floyd’s final album The Division Bell, are almost parodies of a once innovative style, their one-time seamless soundscapes now reduced to a set of stylistic tics.There are a few unexpected treats. Syd Barrett’s “Dominoes”, originally pieced together by Gilmour from some notoriously fragmented sessions, possesses more swing than the rest of the set put together, its lurching, simple changes still potent. And Gilmour’s plaintive rendition of Bizet’s “Je crois entendre encore” certainly pleases him.But denuded of the extravagant stadium staging of the past, songs like “Comfortably Numb” – here graced with the presence of Sir Bob Geldof, a man of many talents but none of them musical – and the horrible “High Hopes” have to stand on their inconsiderable merits. “Wish You Were Here” remains as drably lovely as ever, enhanced by Gilmour’s acoustic soloing, but too often his patented guitar style does little more than punctuate tunes which wouldn’t even pass muster as soundtracks to tampon adverts these days.Yet why should any of this matter? The audience get to see an aged Richard Wright join his old band mate on organ, while enough of Gilmour’s idiosyncratic approach remains to surprise occasionally – he encores sweetly with “Hushabye Mountain” from the soundtrack of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Let the old folks have their fun.

It’s not as if the sizeable ticket price is going up anyone’s hooters any time soon.. The 54-year-old American John Adams is the first living composer to be featured in the BBC’s annual composer weekends at the Barbican since our own John Tavener back in 1994. Yet such is Adams’s status now that it all seemed perfectly natural. Cynics would say that London has a mini-festival of his music every year anyway.There’s no doubting, however, the special value and significance that this BBC event bestows. The Barbican’s weekend passes for the eight concerts, plus films, foyer events and four talks sold out immediately last October, and at least two concerts played to capacity houses, confirming Adams as one of the very few living composers who can attract a queue for returns even for a pre-concert talk. Re-evaluations as well as revelations are, too, very much the order of such an occasion.
Starting the proceedings with the British premiere of his second opera The Death of Klinghoffer (premiered in 1991) was a statement in itself.

Though this was just a concert performance, it flew in the face of several things: not only of the continuing controversies around this tale of Palestinian terrorism which have recently led a leading American musicologist to call for the opera to be banned from performance altogether, but also of any view of its composer as a happy-clappy minimalist. As befits its subject, The Death of Klinghoffer is dark and dissonant, contemplative and challenging; surely the best single achievement of Adams’s career thus far.The choruses at the opera’s heart were here vividly conveyed by the professional BBC Singers (this music is simply too hard for amateur choirs, as a Barbican performance a few years ago made quite clear). And Leonard Slatkin conducted a performance that was also notable for several very fine portrayals of the opera’s individual protaganists – notably, Christopher Maltman as the Captain, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as the terrorist Molqi, and Catherine Wyn-Rogers as Marilyn Klinghoffer, as well as the John Adams veteran Sanford Sylvan in the role of Leon Klinghoffer himself.A concert performance can’t help but emphasise the opera’s occasionally uneven pacing – the sheer amount of slow music in the opening stages, for example. And a few things in the performance, including the rather irritating reverb effect produced by the overall amplification, troubled me. But there was an intelligent and laudable attempt – with a proper director, Paul Curran – to reflect something of the work’s dramatic aspects via gesture and lighting. This was probably the best concert performance of an opera that I have ever seen.The Death of Klinghoffer is to be stage in Ferrara this month.