There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was something of a disappointment to find this week’s five-hour ballet season, which finished last night, pushing a rather blandly uniform story about Tchaikovsky, Darcey Bussell and Margot Fonteyn.

Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, to give its full title, still sounds as deep and rich as it did when I last heard it live nearly 30 years ago.

Clement Crisp, veteran ballet critic, once expressed his appreciation for Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet by saying that “if one had to throw ballets off the back of a sleigh, this would be the last to go.” Charming though the train of thought was that this metaphorical situation provoked (an insomniac ballet critic could muse on it for several nights), it can’t accommodate The Sleeping Beauty, which is to other ballets like the QE2 to Crisp’s sleigh. This behemoth is not going to be thrown anywhere.

When I last saw Vadim Repin in action, he was premiering a work of terrific energy and invention which is here to stay, James MacMillan's Violin Concerto. Tonight in Birmingham and on Monday at the Royal Festival Hall he is back on familiar territory with old friends – Vladimir Fedoseyev and the Tchaikovsky (formerly the Moscow Radio) Symphony Orchestra - in one of the pieces which brought him world recognition at 17 as among the handful of truly great violinists in the world today, the Tchaikovsky concerto.

“It is at the end that a composer can achieve his finest effects,“ declared Richard Strauss. He was thinking of his great operatic and symphonic epilogues, but apply that to the art of conducting, adjust the “at” to “towards”, and it applies supremely well to Claudio Abbado, who has died at the age of 80.

England is the biggest and richest market for the small privately-run company Moscow City Ballet, which stands in a long history of touring companies peddling “authentically” Russian ballet to international audiences. I am forced to admire the business acumen which makes their success possible, given that English National Ballet notoriously makes heavy losses every time it ventures out of London.

There were two strong reasons, I reckoned, for struggling to the Wigmore Hall during the interstitial last week of the year. One was an ascetic wish to be harrowed by a mind and soul of winter, both within and without, in Prokofiev’s towering D minor Violin Sonata, after so much Christmas sweetness and light.

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake (complete ballet) Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Neeme Järvi, with James Ehnes (violin) (Chandos)

It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.

In 1995 a new avian species with unfamiliar markings, the Bourne swan, drew unexpectedly large crowds to a run-down old Islington theatre. I remember it well: seats in the gods were being worn so tight then that feet attached to long legs couldn't be placed on the ground and, negotiating a tolerable view downstairs at the box office, I missed 10 minutes of the display. Since then the very masculine Cygnus bourniensis has been sighted in unlikely places all over the worldand has now returned to overwinter in a more spacious and comfortable Sadler’s Wells.