It is claimed that the philosopher GE Moore had a fantasy. After many years’ work, Tolstoy had finally finished War and Peace. Sonya had copied it out for the umpteenth time. The thing goes off to the printer. Peace reigns. And then, in the middle of the night, Tolstoy leaps out of bed, shrieking, “I forgot to put in a yacht race!”

It is all too easy to be cynical about the ballet version of Don Quixote. With almost no part for the title character, it is a 19th-century Russian take on faux-Spanish dancing, a farce in which the barber Basilio longs for the charming Kitri, while her father wants her to marry a rich fop. As the Radio Times used to say, “Much hilarity ensues.”

Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both West and East, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the 20th century before and after the Revolution. The Mariinsky, once his home, is a premier exponent of his multifaceted styles. 

Older pianomanes may lament the passing of the great Russian schooling that gave us the likes of Sofronitsky, Yudina and Richter. I'm not so sure. The younger generations may have dropped the mystic torch, but their more even-tempered approach can beguile. Yevgeny Sudbin forms the current holy trinity with Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Lugansky. His latest Wigmore recital was revelatory, not always in a good way; that broad beam needn't have swept every corner of the broad Russian church he so singularly constructed in the programme's second half. But anyone who can make Liszt sound as lucid as Haydn is unique.

Act IV is the core of Swan Lake. It doesn’t seem so theatrically, being a peculiar 20-minute bolt-on after an interval that frequently lasts longer than the act that follows. But musically it transcends everything that has gone before, its thready little waltz one of the most delicately tragic things Tchaikovsky ever wrote. And balletically, Lev Ivanov’s rigidly structured classicism draws viewers into the terrifying void that is death. While emotionally the frozen swan-maiden of Act II and the brazen strumpet of Act III here merge to create the incarnation of suffering woman.

It's 50 years since the mighty Kirov Ballet made their debut London tour - reeling from Nureyev's defection days before at the Paris airport. The tour was promoted by the unique impresarios of Soviet culture, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser. Half a century on, the pair are still indefatigably promoting the company, now named Mariinsky Ballet, whose season at Covent Garden opens on Monday, 25 July and runs to Saturday, 13 August.

Chess grand masters have a reputation for possessing the kind of brilliance that’s inclined to tip into madness. Victor Korchnoi claimed he'd played against a dead man, while Wilhelm Steinitz insisted he'd played chess against God by wireless. As for Bobby Fischer, his momentous duel against Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship in Iceland in 1972 earned him the accolade of being perhaps the most brilliant chess player of all time, but by the time of his death in 2008 he had become an embittered, ranting maniac.

A village green, a little big top - and War and Peace. Sometimes large ambitions come in the smallest packages, and one can only take one’s hat off to the ambitious, pocket-sized Giffords Circus for setting out to squish Tolstoy’s four-volume epic of love and internecine war into a very small sawdust ring, with horses, jugglers, aerialists, clowns and gymnasts. And as you park your car on the green and wander over under the quiet afternoon sky to the cute white tent where a rackety little brass band is parping and blaring from inside (and check out the “War and Pizza” trailer for the interval), you are in for a ridiculously good time.

There are many ways to get to the truth. One of the best ways is to ignore the truth. That seems to be the mantra of Ken Russell's colourfully mendacious portrait of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers, receiving its long-awaited DVD release.

Profound experience of 2010? For me, unquestionably, portions of the great Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja's first-time journey through all the Schubert sonatas at the Verbier Festival. I was lucky to catch three out of nine recitals, and to talk to her about Schubert. I'd have been happy to listen again to any of those extraordinary works - all 19 are loveably idiosyncratic - in London. But this was a strand of unusual radiance I hadn't caught at Verbier embracing, as ever, Schubert's deepest sorrow in a late piece served up as prelude, the meltingly beautiful A-major Sonata D664 and that Olympus of Schubertian difficulty, the Wanderer Fantasy.

There's a parallel, of course, between the way Schubert can subject a simple-seeming phrase to endless, discreetly emotional harmonic tweaks and Leonskaja's unfussy evasion of simple repetition when faced with the same idea. And we do hear both Schubert's variations on the opening unison theme of the D915 Allegretto in C minor and their reiteration an awful lot. A delicious lot, to be precise: Leonskaja follows the great source of so much of her inspiration, her mentor and duo partner Sviatoslav Richter, in observing all repeats (his response to a student who didn't, which she quoted expressively to me in the interview, "You don't love Schubert?", seems as good a response as any to false economy). And quite apart from the expressive differences she makes in the repeats, there are always long-term gains.

Take the glowing A-major song of the D664 Sonata's first movement (that Schubert composed it in his early twenties is a miracle in itself). You may even begin to feel it's creeping back once too often - though you will never lose concentration as a listener when Leonskaja plays - but then comes the benediction in the coda, stilling and sublime: the Lied's arpeggiating accompaniment becomes a chordal blessing. Without that longer span, it wouldn't have half the impact. Nor would the shorter, unrepeated but never emotionally lightweight Andante, shifting subtly into unexpected regions. And Leonskaja's epic-lyric balance then sends the Allegro finale soaring, swooping and waltzing into relatively clear blue skies.

All this held the listeners captive, with barely a shuffle, for the first 40 minutes. There was the same connection between intermezzo and sonata, and between the movements of the sonata, with the audience held rapt by Leonskaja's effortlessly profound musicianship, as we'd witnessed, spellbound, in the Chopin recital of 2009 that first made me realise this was one of the few great pianists left after Richter.

Quite a different cradling of life's sadness comes in the day and night of the Wanderer Fantasy. It's a daunting challenge in any programme, and it did mean a jolt from the more private Schubert which Leonskaja seems to understand better than any living pianist. But she is also a comprehensive stylist, with the weighty orchestral pianism of the Russian school keeping bass lines dauntingly clear among the welter of notes. Not that she hits every single one of them; nor did Schnabel, Cortot, Richter, Gilels or many of the other piano titans. But like them she keeps a magisterial sense of where we're going, and the forceful fugue really did crown the work.

Apt, too, that after this Leonskaja should have chosen to end with a composer impressed by the flashier side of Schubert's early Romanticism - birthday boy Franz Liszt, and a typically eloquent song without words, his "Petrarch Sonnet No 104". But I have to say my heart was still with Schubert in tenderest A-major mode.

• Read theartsdesk Q&A with Elisabeth Leonskaja

Overleaf: Leonskaja plays the finale of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata as a concert encore