Superior light music with a sting, done at the highest level: what could be better for a summer lunchtime in the light and airy Cadogan Hall? Our curator was that most collegial of top soloists, trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger. He'd invited colleagues of many nations, all of them first rate, but it was almost a given that chansonnier-composer HK Gruber would steal the show.

For those in sore need of a theatrical pick-me-up, jazz square your way over to Bugsy Malone. Last year’s smash-hit opener of the redeveloped Lyric has been given a well-deserved encore, with Sean Holmes’s production once again nailing the beguiling blend of Alan Parker’s 1976 film: children performing musical mobster pastiche, smartly knowing in their deconstruction of adult absurdities, but sidestepping cloying precocity.

Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces indistinct but for red-slit mouths and coal-black eyes. We seem to be in the room with them, and yet we are isolated. Even a woman looking out from the edge of the canvas gazes straight past us: if not invisible, we are certainly inconsequential.

"Unjustly neglected masterpiece" is a cliché of musical criticism, and usually an exaggeration. Romanian master Enescu's vast journey through aspects of the Oedipus myth seemed like an unacknowledged great among 20th century operas through the medium of the starrily-cast EMI recording with José van Dam as the noblest Greek of all; after Martinu's Julietta and Szymanowski's King Roger, here was the last titan to be properly served by a top UK production.

“Choleric humour, pathos and kindliness are mingled in conflict," wrote Robert Simpson of Nielsen’s 1928 Clarinet Concerto. The work was written for a player with a complex character, full of contradictions. Last night’s soloist, Mark van de Wiel, the Philharmonia's principal clarinettist, gave a fluent performance of the work convincing on its own terms, portraying the protagonist as an introvert and anti-hero.

From Hollywood in 1928 back to Petrograd in 1917 and forward again, the fortunes of Emil Jannings' General Sergius Alexander encapsulate the ambivalence of Austrian-American Josef von Sternberg's silent masterpiece.

Sometimes compared to Boardwalk Empire or The Wire, and raved over by the likes of Brad Pitt, Snoop Dogg and even Jose Mourinho, Peaky Blinders opened its third series by becoming positively Godfather-esque. Writer Steven Knight whisked us away from the satanic mills of Birmingham to Tommy Shelby's sprawling Warwickshire mansion, where the Peakies supremo was trying to celebrate his unexpected wedding to Grace.

You may never have heard of Florence Foster Jenkins, although she has definitely earned a certain renown among music-lovers. For all the wrong reasons: the American soprano, who performed at private recitals in the early decades of the last century, before a climactic Carnegie Hall appearance a month before her death in 1944, was famous for the sheer awfulness of her voice.

Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Asquith didn’t call the shots on the silent movie that launched his distinguished directorial career, but the screenplay he co-wrote with JOC Orton included elaborate scenarist notes that told his designated co-director, AV Bramble, exactly what he intended. It was a gamble that paid off – 1927’s Shooting Stars proved a dazzling combination of tragicomedy and early docudrama, its subject being life in a film studio (Cricklewood in North London).

2015, Sibelius anniversary year, yielded no London performances of the composer's last masterpiece, the Prospero's farewell of his incidental music to The Tempest. With Shakespeare400, 2016 has already made amends: even if the Bardic input came solely from Simon Callow doing all the voices, and summing up the plot – "elsewhere on the island", "meanwhile..." – Osmo Vänskä served up more of the original numbers for the 1926 Copenhagen production than I've encountered live before.