There are two operatic types who should leave Rossini’s epic swansong for the stage well alone. One would usually be a conductor who ignores many of the notes written by a master at the height of his powers, since even the least dramatic numbers have musical idiosyncrasy in them. Antonio Pappano still omits, among other things, Rossini’s superb Mozartian canon-trio for women's voices and wind ensemble; but what he does conduct is so focused and shapely that he must be forgiven.

Any album with a guest appearance from Eric Cantona is going to attract attention. The eighth track of Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon, “La Chanson d’Hélène”, is a sumptuous, string-infused reflection on identity with Serge Gainsbourg-style spoken interjections by Cantona. But it’s not the whole story of this by turns direct and subtle album.

A journey into dreams through songs from Dowland to The Kinks; a Swiss director who, Covent Garden’s Director of Opera Kasper Holten assures us, is “one of the most important European theatre artists”; a Norwegian chanteuse who, I assure you, is a performer of real originality. All that should add up to something just a little bit extraordinary, shouldn’t it? Sadly not. What I saw last night was the kind of thing I’d shrug off having chosen at random from offerings at the Edinburgh Fringe.

The Vein Trio craves the horn. Though a complete and expressive unit in itself, with Swiss brothers Florian and Michael Arbenz on drums and piano respectively, and Thomas Lähns on bass, they’ve been working with a new saxophonist each season. Last year there was a tour with Greg Osby; now they’ve secured the accompaniment of one of the finest, and most humane-sounding of the post-Coltrane saxophonists, the American Dave Liebman.

Remembering the early years of social and sexual liberation in Swiss gay life, Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary The Circle (Der Kreis) has rich affection for its subject. In particular, that’s the relationship between teacher Ernst Ostertag and drag artist Robi Rapp, who first met in the Fifties and have been partners ever since. Both now in their eighties, their documentary remembrances of the time are intercut with staged dramatic material concerning Haupt’s wider subject, the world that grew up around the magazine, social centre and club of the film’s title.

A few months ago, while looking something up about Liszt’s piano piece “Chapelle de Guillaume Tell,” I discovered to my horror that William Tell – like Robin Hood – may never have existed. Even the apple, like the one in Genesis (there is no apple in Genesis), seems to have been made up by someone or other. Tell none the less lives on, if nowhere else, in Schiller’s play and Rossini’s opera based on it, of which everyone knows the overture and – perhaps without realizing it – some of the ballet music.

Mahler’s Six^th Symphony is dominated by the doleful clang of cowbells. They are an other-worldly intrusion into an otherwise familiar musical scene – unless you happen to be in Verbier, that is, in which case they are just another everyday part of the aural landscape.

In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I thought, irrevocably shut for me 45 minutes and four chords into the first act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha could well open again in two concerts – London is to get three on a UK tour this week - around the musical Minimalist theme from Dennis Russell Davies and the excellent Basel Symphony Orchestra.

Back in the 1950s the Zurich underground club Der Kreis was a rare beacon of tolerance of homosexuality in Europe. Fitting then that Swiss director Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary of the same name, The Circle (****), won this year’s Teddy award at the Berlinale, in the documentary category: the Teddies have been going since 1987, making them no less of a pioneer in the gay world, their brief to acknowledge and support LGBT cinema from around the world.

"The objects in pictures look out at us serene or severe, tense or relaxed, comforting or forbidding, suffering or smiling." Thus said Paul Klee (1879-1940) in a lecture on modern art in 1924. It is an entirely accurate description of his own work, drawing as it does on dream and nightmare, fairytales and apocalyptic visions, not to mention landscape, portrait, architecture, aquatic scenes, the world around him and abstract imaginings: the whole gamut.