L’Orchestre du Nouveau Monde’s young musicians went viral for their defiant performances during the last week’s protests in France. They belong to a fine tradition of radical orchestras. Also, today, what music should soundtrack the Traitors?

They were the last people standing – or rather playing – during last week’s student protests in France, as gas canisters landed in double-bass cases. L’Orchestre du Nouveau Monde, co-founded by young conductor Étienne Jarrier and his friends when they were still teenagers, aren’t a typical orchestra. With their manifesto of activism and social justice, the orchestra is not “a sacred object of beauty, but a tool for struggle”, through civil disobedience, outreach in schools, demonstrations and concerts, all to “present a different kind of classical music – one reconnected to reality”.

The new world Jarrier and his group dream of is “anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, environmentalist and committed to de-growth”, and their way of working is deliberately provocative, not only to so many of the dominant directions of travel in the political world, but also to the institutions of classical music. They play scrappily passionate performances of La Marseillaise, of music from The Avengers, of Dvořák’s New World Symphony and protest songs but the ONM judge the quality of their performances not by playing the right notes in the right order, but by their consciousness-raising impact, whether they’re staging performances at Place de la République in Paris or at the foot of a glacier.

The death of Stephen Kovacevich, aged 86, was announced yesterday. Tom Service pays tribute to a pianist whose performances were full of beauty, clarity – and danger

And, here, in a piece published on Kovacevich’s 75th birthday, Andrew Clements picks his favourite recordings.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Stephen Kovacevich and I were last in contact. He was in hospital, recovering from a hip operation, and we were talking about Hiromi, and where the latest generation of pianists were coming from. The players who had the brilliance, fire and commitment to the moment that his favourite players had: Vladimir Horowitz, Sergei Rachmaninov – his greatest of the greats – and his friend and occasional mentee, Yuja Wang.

Among other things, he told me about a Charles Munch performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique he had discovered on YouTube that made him exclaim: “How the hell did he get an orchestra to play like that?” Conversation with Stephen was always like that: utterly intense, totally opinionated, with the feeling that the spirits he was talking about, whether performers or composers from Chopin to Beethoven to Brahms to Mozart to Bach, were in the room with you, conjured into being as real, passionate people and presences.

A new documentary follows the Chicagoan from child trumpet prodigy to Gabriel-singing icon and DIY maverick. ‘Not everybody wants to see musical genius’, he says

At We Out Here festival in Dorset in August, thousands of people could be heard singing a trumpet melody as if it was a giant brass-band karaoke session. On stage was Peven Everett, performing a rendition of Gabriel, one of the most celebrated anthems in dance-music history. Co-created with producer Roy Davis Jr, the best-known version, which blew up in UK clubs in the mid-90s, is a spiritual garage-house track about the “archangel of love” that can bring both punters and DJs to tears.

But Everett is much more than one song. Damon Albarn of Gorillaz tells me that “Peven has a once-in-a-generation voice … he’s a great inspiration to us all.” We Out Here founder, Gilles Peterson says that the Chicagoan is, alongside Detroit’s Moodymann and Amp Fiddler, “the closest thing dance music has to a Prince-type figure”. A prolific multi-instrumentalist and one-man cottage industry, Everett’s catalogue spans more than 500 tracks, across house, neo-soul, hip-hop, samba and more.

The rapper lends the NFL a veneer of credibility but is unlikely to push back on the establishment figures who run the league

On Monday the NFL named Jay-Z as the headliner for this season’s Super Bowl half-time show. His company, Roc Nation, produces the show under a 2019 deal reportedly worth $5m a year, and the agreement was extended for another five years in 2024. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said his one request when the partnership began was that Jay-Z “take the stage himself one day“.

Goodell’s wish makes total sense: Jay-Z is the perfect choice for the half-time show, and that’s not a compliment. The NFL wants a shill who can still pass for a rebel, and nobody in American music plays that part better than Jay-Z.

Backstory of modest industry veteran who started out as one half of pop duo Peter and Gordon, and went on to produce acts such as James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt

Rock’n’roll is notorious for its tales of bad behaviour: throwing TVs out of the window, mountains of cocaine, parades of groupies … but you won’t find any of that here. Peter Asher, brother of Jane, one half of Peter and Gordon, and super-successful producer of acts such as James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, appears to be about as nerdish and clean-living as a 60s/70s music industry veteran could be. Although that might just be what he wants us to think; what are the chances Asher is a complete reprobate away from the camera, and is just brilliant at hiding it? That glasses and ruffled shirt front combo definitely reminds you of someone a tad more sleazy, even before Asher himself reminds you about it in the final credits.

Whatever the truth, Asher by any standards carved an amazing path, making the absolute most of being in the right place at the right time. Smartly structured around Asher’s anecdotes-and-music live show, the film stitches together a collection of clips, audio and musical performances that gallops through his personal backstory. His luckiest break, of course, was that his early partnership with schoolfriend Gordon Waller (modelled, it turned out, on the Everly Brothers) benefited from cast-off songs handed over by his sister’s boyfriend, one Paul McCartney; there’s an amusing moment where we hear John Lennon’s sneer at the lyric of what would become Peter and Gordon’s first and biggest hit, A World Without Love: “Please lock me away …” “Yes”. While the film clearly acknowledges the debt to McCartney’s songwriting (which presumably Lennon vetoed for the Beatles), it’s perhaps not quite ready to admit that without this connection, none of what followed would have happened at all.