Distributor Second Run’s second collection of the Czech New Wave (strictly speaking, Czechoslovak, although the three films included here are from the Czech side of the movement) reminds us what an astonishing five years or so preceded the Prague Spring of 1968. What a varied range of film-makers and filmic styles it encompassed, making any attempt to impose any external category – whether political or artistic – redundant.

“Iconoclast” is the word used in one of the booklet essays accompanying Second Run’s rerelease of two films by the great Czech director Věra Chytilová (1929-2014) to describe her work. Other terms that have appeared over the years include: feminist, formalist, “overheated kettle that you can’t turn down”, and “first lady of the Czech New Wave”. Not all of those are of similar value, but nevertheless catch an element of her diversity.

Groan-inducing rhymes are becoming a feature of Opera North’s autumn season. Like their Coronation of Poppea, this revival of The Bartered Bride has some cracking lines. Matching "swanky" with "cranky" and "lanky" is pretty neat, but hearing James Creswell’s oleaginous Kecal slip in "hanky-panky" is a masterstroke.Quite why we’ve got sporadic surtitles is a mystery; Leonard Hancock and David Pountney’s smart translation is clearly audible throughout. This company’s chorus is one of its greatest assets, and every syllable tells.

The name of Czech director Karel Zeman is far less-known in the English-speaking world than it deserves to be. He began working during World War Two, establishing a name for himself in the rich Czech animation school (and proving a later influence on that movement’s master, Jan Švankmajer), and thus is a decade or two earlier than that country’s celebrated New Wave cinema movement of the 1960s.

Though never really part of the country’s groundbreaking New Wave, František Vláčil was a Czech master who's best known for his films like Marketa Lazarová  and The Valley of the Bees, both complex historical works.

Janáček’s opera subjects – the 300-year-old opera singer, the composer with a mad mother-in-law, the Siberian prison camp – are by any standards a fairly rum collection. But The Cunning Little Vixen is arguably the most deviant of the whole bunch. Its foxy heroine (out of a Prague newspaper cartoon strip) is captured by the local Forester, lectures his hens about their subservience to the Cockerel, slaughters the lot of them, runs off, marries, starts a family, then allows herself to be shot by the poacher. All very charming, random and pathetic, one might feel.

For all its playful, subversive energy, it’s sometimes easy to view the Czech New Wave as kind of a stylistic monolith. In fact, the slackening of state control between 1963 to 1968 spawned a variety of filmic departures, and three very different forks in the road are travelled down in this latest collection from Second Run, each profoundly radical in their own way.

There are always risks involved in the uncompromising side of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s family-friendly concerts. Succulent slices of fox-meat in the form of a suite from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen gave the kids a nourishing start, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was always going to seduce them with her effervescent narrative, especially given Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša’s youthful instincts to paint big, bold pictures.

A few of the things that are made to seem intensely erotic in this film: glue, bread, nails, carp, a satchel, a lift door, the death of a hen, the postal service, and in one particularly discombobulating scene, giant multi-headed shaving brushes. The Czech director Jan Švankmajer's allegiances couldn't be clearer: in the credits, he references Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, Freud, Buñuel, Max Ernst and 1930s Czech surrealist, psychoanalyst and author of Autosexualismus a Psycherotismus, Bohuslav Brouk.

In Rock’n’Roll, the play by Tom Stoppard, two characters haunt the stage without actually appearing on it. One of them, Syd Barrett, absconded from Pink Floyd to lead the life of a hermit. The other, Václav Havel, gave up the life of an internationally acclaimed, domestically banned playwright to become a head of state. Only one of them was in the audience for the premiere at the Royal Court. And it wasn’t the hermit.