Like the comedies of Mozart – the genius the artistic milieu depicted in Capriccio seems to be waiting for, if its original 1770s setting is observed – the more conversational operas of Richard Strauss depend far more than one often realises on conducting that sets a stylish, buoyant pace. Without it, and even more more rehearsal time than Garsington allows, musical heaven remains just out of reach.

Take a first, passing glance at the debut album from Hailey Tuck and she could be mistaken for Katy Perry, done up in florid new image finery. The Texas-born, Paris-living 27 year old, however, on further inspection (and, more to the point, on listening), is nothing like that pop superstar.

"Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets," declared Puccini in annoucing his own operatic setting of the Abbé Prévost's 1731 novel Manon Lescaut.

There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life.

One question dominates any staging of Dialogues des Carmélites. How will the production team deal with the cruelty and tragedy in the 12th and last scene when all of the nuns, one by one, go through with their vow of martyrdom and calmly proceed to the guillotine, singing the Salve Regina? No spoilers here, but this new production at Guildhall School (a very different one from that staged in 2011) sticks to a tone which is calm, and humane.

Don’t you just love that new concert hall smell? The main hall at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is so new that as soon as you walk in you get the scent of fresh woodwork; so new, in fact, that it won’t even be officially opened until next month (Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the Earl of Wessex are doing the honours, apparently).

Happily, there’s hope for Spiral junkies – as series six ends, we bring you news that series seven has just gone into production. This is just as well, because these last dozen episodes have been an object lesson in how to make TV drama for the mind and body, nimbly evading cop show genre-pitfalls to bring us carefully-shaded characters operating within a Venn diagram of overlapping grey areas. Big kudos, yet again, to showrunner Anne Landois.

Living-museum recitals on a variety of historic instruments pose logistical problems. Telling The Arts Desk about his award-nominated CD of mostly 19th-century works for horns and pianos, Alec Frank-Gemmill remarked on the near-impossibility of reproducing the experiment in the concert-hall: playing on four period horns would need several intervals, and colleague Alasdair Beatson would hardly be likely to have the four pianos in the same room.

We’ve seen some “interesting” series filling BBC Four’s celebrated Saturday evening slot recently, which if nothing else have prompted plenty of below-the-line discussion. Happily, we can now turn our backs on all that and hail the return of the ace Paris-based French cop show Spiral.

Whatever the Waitrose and Morrisons commercials are telling you, as far as TV schedulers are concerned ‘tis the season for murder. Thus a Christmas Maigret has become an instant tradition, with Rowan Atkinson reprising his performance as Georges Simenon’s dolorous detective.