The "graphic novel" (what people of my age used to call a cartoon strip) is achieving more and more respectability these days. It's certainly moving away from being an item solely for children, especially in Japan where its "manga" form is hugely popular with all ages.

That said, I've seen it coming up in a couple of unlikely places in the last month - both opera and Internet technology - and been really impressed by the results.

Nearly a year on from starting Bachtrack, we keep on finding ever more improbable concert venues. It transpires that the main Blüthner piano showroom, a short stone's throw away from the uber-posh offices in London's Berkeley Square, puts on concerts once a fortnight or so. The concerts are played by aspiring young musicians, they are "by invitation" (in other words, you have to get in touch with Blüthner and ask to be put on their mailing list), and they're free - including the glass or two of wine provided on the house. The whole thing is a pleasantly sociable occasion.

A quick trip over to the Early Music Festival today, held in the gorgeous surroundings of the Wren-architected Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

The exhibition was suitably packed with the expected collections of lutes, viols, cornets, crumhorns, harpsichords and more different flavours of recorders and flutes than you could imagine. Many of the instruments are simply beautiful: early music people seem to take the aesthetics of their instruments far more seriously than the rest of us.

We went to the Wigmore Hall on Saturday for a kids' concert put on by our friends at Cavatina: the Kungsbacka Trio, augmented by Laurence Power and Graham Mitchell, playing Schubert's Trout Quintet. It was a full performance of the whole quintet: what made it a kids' concert (apart from the audience) was the fact that the musicians preceded the main performance by teaching about the Quintet, using a pleasant story about young Franz going on a fishing trip. They adorned the story with various snatches of the music to explain to the children what to listen out for.

Every so often, a piece of music simply grabs you by the arm and drags you with it when you're least expecting it. I don't suppose that anyone could consider a piano trio by Vítězslav Novák to be exactly mainstream - his works aren't played all that often even in his native Czech - and while Bohuslav Martinů is considerably better known, his piano trios wouldn't feature on the list of works considered "safe" by concert promoters.

Just to prove that nothing is new under the sun:

It transpires that Queen Elizabeth I was a keen dancer, who would dance four Galliards before breakfast. The dance was very energetic, and undoubtedly set her up for a hard day of politics and governance. So if the creators of the modern aerobic dance workout think they were doing something original - they got beaten to it by 400 years or so!

This comes to you from a Radio 3 programme on Renaissance dance music. Sadly, you can't get to it on Listen Again any more, but the playlist is still up on the site:

With your child's weekly piano lesson coming round (or violin or oboe or whatever), the inevitable debate rears its ugly head about "how often have you practised this week?". Sadly, classical music demands many hours of practice: even international stars seem to spend a terrifying proportion of their waking hours practising, regardless of how much native talent they have.

The answer to the question "how much practice do I need" depends largely on what standard you want to achieve. If you just want to learn a bit about the instrument and become competent to play a few pieces nicely, you'll get away with an hour or three a week. If you want to play in a band or orchestra without making a fool of yourself, you'll need more. But how much do you need to become a real expert, a world-class performer?

Finishing our Italian trip in Venice: here are a few sketches about what's going on.

Inevitably, I suppose, it's pretty much wall-to-wall Vivaldi. You'll find performances of the Four Seasons every day, sometimes in several different places; there are occasional concerts featuring his other works. A lot of the music is packaged for tourists rather than for sophisticated classical music listeners: we tried a typical event calling itself "Baroque and Opera" and consisting of one Baroque concerto (surprisingly not by Vivaldi) and a dozen or so favourite arias from Italian opera, performed by musicians in baroque dress.

This blog comes to you from the family holiday in Northern Italy, or more precisely from Desenzano del Garda on the southern shore of Lake Garda, surely one of the world's great beauty spots.

One of the joys (not) of running the Bachtrack website is the need to constantly keep cleaning the data. We try really hard to make sure that the lists of composers and works are in a consistent format, and as complete and accurate as we can make them, at least for the major composers. This results in tasks like this afternoon's effort of running through the thousand or so compositions by Schubert (extraordinary, given that he died aged just 31) trying to knock out all the duplicates and misspellings.