“The exercise of fantasy is to imagine other ways of life,” says one of the role-players during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon, because “without understanding how others might live, I ask you, how will we ever understand ourselves?” It’s a good question, and writer and director Jack Bradfield, in his enchanting new play The Habits, has a good stab at answering it.

A showstopper for starters followed by dark depths, a quirky compilation after the interval: it’s what you might expect from Iván Fischer and his 42-year-old Budapest Festival Orchestra. All Prokofiev, too: the sort of thing we used to get from Valery Gergiev and visiting Petersburgers. Yet while Gergiev’s alliance with Putin means he’ll not be here again, Fischer has balanced criticising Orbán and keeping his Hungarian orchestra on the road.

When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again.

One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound attention to what otherwise might be inconsequential moments of connection, their soft, contemplative intimacies and banal departures.

You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a concentrated mesh of Edward Said’s only-connect observations with a well-balanced musical programme, something along the lines of the recent 90-minute cloud tapestry the City of London Sinfonia wove with atmospheric scientist Simon Clark (Rachel Halliburton, whom I accompanied, loved it, as did I).

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. 

Anja Bihlmaier returned to the BBC Philharmonic – for the first time in the Bridgewater Hall as principal guest conductor – with a programme to mark International Women’s Day, and consisting entirely of music by women composers, past and present.

What happens after the spotlight is directed towards another target? In the case of Liverpool and the Merseybeat boom – which, in terms of chart success, peaked in 1963 – the question is addressed by Liverpool Sunset: The City After Merseybeat 1964–1969. The city’s musicians carried on, despite record labels looking elsewhere for the next big thing, and despite the Liverpool tag no longer ensuring an automatic interest.

Exactly half a century ago, Semyon Bychkov fled the USSR for the United States as he sought to swap tyranny for liberty. Last night, in a world that feels utterly different yet even more terrifying, the great conductor turned the stellar talents of his Czech Philharmonic Orchestra to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich: both a victim, and a troubled celebrant, of the searing Soviet history he endured.