In a year of absences and separations, here was another one we had to bear. Built around a programme of Baroque double concertos, last night’s Prom should have brought Nicola Benedetti and Alina Ibragimova together in a violin super-duo that promised marvels.

Ah, 2015. Those halcyon days of packed theatres. Thank God the RSC had the presence of mind to film Polly Findlay’s production of The Merchant of Venice, now streaming on BBC iPlayer.

Franck: Psyché, Le Chasseur maudit, Les Éolides RCS Voices, Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Jean-Luc Tingaud (Naxos)

Franck by Franck: Symphony in D Minor, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/Mikko Franck (Alpha Classics)

Don’t Look Now is beautiful in its dankness – an eldritch psychological thriller that follows a grieving father’s stream-of-consciousness as it flows into deadly waters.

Scholars still wrangle over the work now known as Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. Was this an integral piece written for a single liturgical occasion, or a sort of anthology of luxury items assembled to help the composer’s bid to escape the underpaid drudgery of life at the Mantuan court and win the top post at St Mark’s in Venice?

There’s a barely disguised sense of threat running through the 2019 Venice Biennale. Of the 79 participating artists and groups, all are living and there’s a sharp sense that the purpose of the exhibition is to diagnose the ills afflicting the contemporary world.

Dried flowers like offerings lie atop a gauze-covered rectangular frame. Pebbles surround its base alongside plaster casts, a desiccated dragonfly and an animal foot charm. Their placement is purposeful; their exact significance unclear. Four rib-high figures with moon faces, sausage string necks and wafer-thin bodies face the frame. Three wear golden gowns like devotees or disciples; all bear pendulous, darkly bellying stomachs before them over their clothes.

The grand finale of Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable Pinter at the Pinter season is this starry production of one of the writer’s greatest – and certainly most personal – works, inspired by his extramarital affair with Joan Bakewell.

“There’s a lot of weirdness I didn’t want explained,” Paul Schrader reveals at one point in a new director’s commentary to his 1990 film.

Witches, vampires and magicke of all descriptions continue to be big box office, so Sky 1’s new dramatisation of the first book of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy should be finding a ready-made audience. Anybody who’s into this kind of stuff will be accomplished in the art of suspending their disbelief, a task made easier by the show’s handsome production values and telegenic cast.