The mid-1930s, when the Nazi government replaced the Weimar republic, was a bleak time for the composers featured in last night’s Philharmonia concert. Arnold Schoenberg was the first to leave for the US, followed by Paul Hindemith in 1938. Alban Berg avoided emigration only by the extreme measure of dying, suddenly, in 1935.

Goethe’s Die Leiden des junges Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was a vital spark in the ignition of the German romantic movement. The story of a young man driven to kill himself for love of a woman, Charlotte, who loves him but marries someone else out of duty to her family, it was first published in 1774. It triggered a fever across Europe ranging from fashion trends (Werther wears blue with a yellow waistcoat) to a spate of copycat suicides. Among its admirers were Beethoven, Brahms, Napoleon and Frankenstein’s Monster.

You might think that being first on the bill with a half-hour slot at 1.15pm would be an affront to a band who’d had a 12-times platinum album and ruled the 90s airwaves, but if they are offended Simply Red aren’t showing it. A weatherbeaten Mick Hucknall and his beaming companions are kicking off BBC Radio 2’s annual "Festival in a Day", a highly civilised affair (you can pre-order 80-quid picnics and it finishes at 9.30pm) featuring sets from huge pop names and chatty links by cheerful Radio 2 presenters.

While the Proms were ringing out the old season, the Wigmore Hall ushered in the big celebration of 2020: the 250^th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. The venue’s year-long festival (actually longer – the actual birthday is December ‘20) kicked off with a Beethoven weekend with more than just Beethoven in it.

At first, the opening episode of Sky 1’s enticing new drama Temple looked like it was going to be mostly concerned with a heist gone wrong. A gang of bandits were busily stealing an enormous mountain of money when they were inadvertently locked inside the building they were robbing by their half-witted getaway driver.

This is the kind of thing that the Proms does well – indeed, where else would it get an outing? A "big event" piece of massive scale in terms of size and duration, in many ways a modern Spem in Alium, but where Tallis’s 1570 piece demands 40 singers, In the Name of the Earth ups the ante to 700-plus voices, led by eight conductors and arrayed around the Royal Albert Hall.

Described as a "performer-led re-devising’"of Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni - a tale of an arrogant and ruthless lothario who seduced countess women - Don Jo certainly played around with many of the norms we encounter in both sexual relationships and in the operatic genre.

Neu!, Neu! 2 and Neu! 75.

Seeing post-war London in vibrant colour is a delicious surprise, and the opening seconds of A Kid for Two Farthings follow a pigeon flying east from Trafalgar Square, eventually settling on a pub sign in Petticoat Lane. The location footage in Carol Reed’s first colour film, from 1955, is eye-popping, his cast mixing seamlessly with everyday market folk.

Over the weekend, exhibitions and installations have started to bubble-up on the riverside walkway in London. Still-life photography of mudlark finds and a "scented history" of Barking Creek outside the National Theatre. Artwork from a dozen national and international river cities at the Royal Docks. An installation of 550 jerry cans at the Oxo Tower. A 60-foot wooden Ship of Tolerance on the Thames (main image) by Millennium Bridge.