Without the definite article, what kind of a Flute is Peter Brook's - beyond, that is, the literal manifestation of a stick on a string that makes no soothing noises? Best describe it as a crescent moon of a version, loosely based on Schikaneder's text with less than half of Mozart's music and matching slivers of voices, attached to mostly fledgling stage presences. The diminishing returns of Brook's operatic deconstructions, from the bold Tragedy of Carmen through the more seriously compromised Impressions of Pelléas, here reach a dead end in a kind of bleached purgatory.

As a young man searching for a way to make a living in Paris, Antoine Watteau briefly tried his hand at engraving fashion plates. He seems to have had a natural affinity for cloth and drew its folds and creases with such apparent ease that you can almost feel the slipperiness of satin and hear the rustle of taffeta as it moves with the body. This was just as well, since he didn’t attend the Academy where students did life drawing and learned anatomy.

An artist as inventive and as protean as Picasso, and one who ceaselessly absorbed influences throughout his life, will inevitably present an ever-changing face to the world. Hence, we have an apparently inexhaustible supply of exhibitions devoted to him.

Ninety-five per cent of Napoleon's army was wiped out on the freezing retreat from Moscow in 1812. The statistics weren't nearly as impressive nor, thankfully, so mortal for the Russian National Orchestra's concert in Paris's Salle Pleyel last Saturday. It happened under reduced circumstances that hardly affected the quality of the playing - though sadly nothing could be done about the wayward conducting of the controversial (though not, it seems, in France) Mikhail Pletnev.

In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.

In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.

So this is Christmas, a time to seek comfort in traditional nourishment both culinary and cultural. In Edinburgh, the King’s Theatre has been home to mainstream panto - the equivalent of serving up a hearty turkey with all the trimmings – since time immemorial, which leaves the capital’s other theatres jockeying for position. What to do? Hedge all bets and aim for different-but-not-too-different, or raise the stakes and try something more adventurous altogether?

Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Converted into a four-part series from William Boyd's 2002 novel, with a screenplay by Boyd himself, it's the story of the writer Logan Mountstuart, whose long life spanned the major events of the 20th century while bouncing around between various continents and relationships.

It's the Mousetrap of musicals, the wholly unstoppable show and, to mark its 25th anniversary this year (the 30th, if you date it back to the initial French concept album and Paris production), it will be staged in London at three different venues. You can even see them all in a single, mighty weekend bender, if the mood takes you: the original Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre, a celebratory all-star concert at the O2 Arena on 3 October and an invigorating new production which plays at the Barbican after a national tour until 2 October.

She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant Belle Epoque drawing room. Music swirls, eyes swivel. And no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known to all and sundry as Coco, is making an entrance. Another one.

The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike Turner biopic. The release continues a process that began in the early 1990s, when a slow, posthumous rise to recognition of Serge Gainsbourg began outside the Francophone world, au delà de l’Hexagon.