It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.

Birmingham Royal Ballet’s star Robert Parker has been a ballet dancer and a trainee pilot - and is now to become artistic director of Elmhurst Ballet School in Birmingham, one of the two most important ballet schools in Britain.

This site has never acknowledged a distinction between high and popular culture. Nor, it seems, does the city of Birmingham. Currently bidding for UK City of Culture 2013, it is also promoting itself as the "Home of (Heavy) Metal". This summer, at various locations across the Black Country, a four-month festival looks at the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and celebrates the people who inspired him to “bark at the moon”.

Imagine you are at a study day being run by Friends of the Earth. They mount a play in which a group of angels who somehow got left out of the Book of Genesis fall to a completely barren earth, look around, and start reconstructing, re-enacting its life and death. They plant, grow, overgrow, eat, overeat; they tell themselves the earth will always be fruitful, but they’re mistaken. In the end two of the angels become Adam and Eve and walk off hand in hand into a ruined landscape lit by the rising sun. Then Luke Bedford sets it all to music.

There was a macabre irony at the heart of this final concert in the CBSO’s Mahler cycle in Symphony Hall. Everything was back to front. It started with a Resurrection and ended with a death. Like the universe, it began with a bang and ended, Eliot-fashion, with a whimper. And the Resurrection wasn’t even Mahler’s (that happened last month), but Messiaen’s: his Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, a work which reduces redemption to sounding brass and crashing gongs.

Gustav Mahler died, according to his wife Alma’s memoirs, at midnight on 18 May, 1911. Anyone mystically inclined to connect noughts and "o"s – you see it crossed my mind – might find some spooky link between 00:00 (pedantically, the time of death was 23:05) and the fact that, for this centenary concert, indisposed conductor OramO (Sakari) was belatedly replaced by OnO (Kazushi). What transpired was delight – near-delirium, in fact – that a supreme master had total control of the composer’s Second (Resurrection) Symphony: a theatrical celebration of life and death rather than a transcendental meditation, but a masterpiece still, if perfectly realised.

Even if you are not of an age to have watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers when they were first broadcast by the BBC, you will have heard of John Cleese. And if you are remotely a fan of comedy, you will hold Cleese in high regard as he is a writer, performer and actor of great talent, and this show, an overview of his life and career, proves it beyond argument.

The most socially committed BBC drama producer of the Sixties and Seventies, best known for his exemplary partnership with Ken Loach, Tony Garnett has twice opted to direct. If Handgun (1984), his critique of American gun control, is largely forgotten, Prostitute (1980) is recalled for its worthy campaign to decriminalise soliciting for sex and for its single explicit scene - a massage-parlour handjob so ungainly it promotes self-gratification.

These days it’s all meant to be about tracks, not albums; modern music listeners, it’s said, have pitifully short attention spans and skip flightily from one song to the next, like bees with ADHD in a blossoming orchard, without pausing to put each song in its proper context. But the third collection from Guillemots, the four-piece band who originated in Birmingham, is a proper, old-fashioned album: Walk the River has shape, structure, almost a narrative arc, taking the listener on an emotional journey that goes from despair to hope to joy to resolution.

Family-favourite storyballets dominate Birmingham Royal Ballet's 2011-12 season, as the company looks forward to a stringent year. Beauty and Beast, Hobson's Choice and Far From the Madding Crowd, three of director David Bintley's full-lengthers, and the iconic Peter Wright Nutcracker for Christmas aim to be money-spinners for three mixed programmes, culminating in a Bintley creation next summer on an athletic theme to chime with the 2012 Olympics.