The Bolshoi Ballet and its London promoters have confirmed wholesale casting changes to the Covent Garden tour starting next Monday, due to the last-minute absence of prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. Zakharova was due to give six performances, but has withdrawn due to a hip injury, it is said. Her partner the celebrated male star Nikolai Tsiskaridze has withdrawn from Giselle, and appearances by another senior ballerina Maria Alexandrova have also been reduced.

The Bolshoi Ballet and its London promoters have confirmed wholesale casting changes to the Covent Garden tour starting next Monday, due to the last-minute absence of prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. Zakharova was due to give six performances, but has withdrawn due to a hip injury, it is said. Her partner the celebrated male star Nikolai Tsiskaridze has withdrawn from Giselle, and appearances by another senior ballerina Maria Alexandrova have also been reduced.

The unveiling of the Serpentine Pavilion (now in its 10th year) has become as much of a summer fixture as Henley. And yet it is not without controversy. Why, for instance, does the Serpentine Gallery in London insist on commissioning global stars such as Frank Gehry and now Jean Nouvel when it could be giving up-and-coming architects much needed exposure? Its original remit was to show architects who had not yet built on British soil, but though this has held true for eight of the 10 commissions, it certainly wasn't true of Gehry (who had built a cancer unit in Dundee), nor now of Nouvel: his One New Change, a shopping and office complex right next to St Paul's Cathedral, will be unveiled in the autumn. Other commissions have been by equally illustrious figures.

It wasn't memorialised in HD. But last night Ringo Starr turned 70 and welcomed Paul McCartney onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York for a musical celebration. There was only one song they were going to perform, and a thousand mobile phone cameras were duly held aloft to capture it. The results have sprouted overnight on YouTube, and they all have the grainy shakycam quality of all that old footage from the Cavern Club.

One of the greatest pianists (and latterly conductors) of his generation, founder and artistic director of the Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev, has been charged by Thai police with raping a 14-year-old boy, according to the BBC. Police also raided his Thai home in connection with a paedophile ring and found, say prosecutors, several "compromising" photographs with underage boys.

One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist, but took Titian’s mysterious final paintings as its starting point – works so baffling in their subject matter and background that they involved him in far more factual research than he had originally anticipated when he began work in 2005.