Forget, for a moment, the legend and the lustre. If you knew nothing about Riccardo Muti’s half-century of history with Verdi’s Messa da Requiem for the writer-patriot Alessandro Manzoni – he first gave it with the Philharmonia back in 1974 – and came fresh to this conductor with this work, would it shake the soul? On the evidence of the 83-year-old maestro’s performance with the same orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall last night, the answer would have to be a resonant affirmative.

Resurrecting the origins of old rock stars is becoming quite the thing, After cinema’s Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan and upcoming Bruce Springsteen films, theatreland has staged Tina, A Night with Janis Joplin and MJ, and the Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon is touring again soon. On a more intimate scale, now there's Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n'Roll, about the Dr Feelgood co-founder and rock guitarist extraordinaire who outflanked cancer and became a star of Game of Thrones.

The End, a quasi-musical from Joshua Oppenheimer, who has previously only produced documentaries, is a surreal examination of a group of individuals isolated from the chaos of a collapsing external world. Sheltered (or trapped?) in an eerily beautiful salt mine are a mother (Tilda Swinton), father (Michael Shannon), son (George MacKay), their doctor (Lennie James), butler (Tim McInnerny), and friend (Bronagh Gallagher).

Creatives – or creatures? In the 1660s, women – having been banned from working as actors in previously more puritanical decades – finally arrived on the stage in London theatres. Although they were sometimes scorned as “playhouse creatures”, often condemned as monsters and whores, they were also seen as demi-goddesses, capable of enchanting their audiences.

Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly hoping for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as their MOZART250 programme ambitiously tracks, in annual increments, the music that Wolfgang Amadeus wrote exactly 250 years ago.

La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu.

Mariam Batsashvili, the young virtuosa pianist from Georgia, is a star. No doubt about that. Trained at the Liszt Academy in Weimar and winner of the International Franz Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in that city in 2015, she should know something about how to play Liszt’s music.

So much looked promising for Irish National Opera’s first Wagner: the casting, certainly, the conductor – Music Director Fergus Sheil knows and loves this music – and the venue (the Libeskind-designed Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, proven ideal for Richard Strauss). How could a production go wrong with such a theatrical romantic tale, a pioneering music-drama for its time (1843)? All too easily, it seems, by either coming up with inappropriate business or letting the singers stand and deliver.

When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the Korean romcoms section. This is a recommendation for romcom fans, a warm indulgent bubble bath of a watch. It's like turning the clock back to more innocent times, while full of contemporary pizzazz. 

It took until the last song before Lauren Mayberry started to well up onstage, which was good going. The singer had mentioned early on the prospect of a hometown Glasgow gig for her solo career had left her emotional all day, both with joy and fear.