Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite, maybe, with enough bold textures to recall wandering attentions. We needed less of this, and more of the Duke Ellington selections superbly played by the 15-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in the first half.

If not quite his last will and testament, the work now known as Bach’s Mass in B Minor represents a definitive show-reel or sample-book of the Leipzig cantor’s choral and orchestral art. Its complex patchwork of manuscripts dating from different decades only came together for a full public performance in 1859: the year in which Wagner completed Tristan und Isolde. 

“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.

To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.

Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space becoming, in the process, a compulsive read: a fascinating Russian nesting doll of family trauma.

“A band you’re gonna like, whether you like it or not.” The proclamation in the press ads for the New York Dolls’ debut album acknowledged they were a hard sell.

Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from Disclaimer on Apple TV to Anora and Queer at the cinema, much of it noisily explicit. The intimacy co-ordinators must be having a field day.

I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.

There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.

It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.

Refitted with a largely fresh creative team, the show ticks all the boxes that devotees of the movie will want and expect, while never really establishing a reason for being of its own, as Kinky Boots, from the same director (Jerry Mitchell), managed so triumphantly some while back.

Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid.