It's not completely unheard of what Sir Simon Rattle did at the start of last night's Prom, where he elided two familiar works - Ligeti's colouristic classic Atmosphères and the Prelude to Act One of Wagner's Lohengrin - into a seamless whole, beating without stopping from one into the other. But it was still pretty breathtaking.

Berlin’s Paul Van Dyk has remained in or around the top ten of DJ Magazine’s defining annual poll of the top 100 DJs in the world for at least a decade, occasionally making the number one spot. Unlike all others in the current top 20, however, he’s the only one with a pedigree going back to contemporary club music’s roots. As Visions of Shiva at the dawn on the Nineties Van Dyk can claim to be one of the inventors of trance music, the style that, alongside recent dubstep developments, is at the root of massive American interest in what they laughably term “EDM” (electronic dance music).

It was Lenin who realised early in the Russian Revolution that “of all the arts, film is for us the most important” and Hitler and Goebbels perceived the immense propaganda potential of the Olympics through the medium of film. The 1936 Olympic Games took place in Berlin a few months after Hitler’s armies occupied the Rhineland. Hitler spared no expense in making it the best organised and most efficiently equipped in the history of the Olympics.

Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last night at the Royal Festival Hall. Subtly marshalling his Staatskapelle Berlin from the keyboard, Barenboim was a wholly transformed figure from the ingratiating, lollipop-distributing showman I'd seen at the Tate Modern last year. 

The Red Army Faction was Germany's key revolutionary force for a decade from the late 1960s onwards, and its story, especially the characters of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, has proved highly attractive to the country's filmmakers. Uli Edel’s 2008 The Baader Meinhof Complex told the key political story in lengthy detail through to its end in 1977 when four of its key members (in the official version) committed suicide in prison. One of them was Gudrun Ensslin, who became radicalized after she became a lover of Andreas Baader.

In a major festival upset last night, the Taviani brothers Paolo and Vittorio won the 2012 Berlinale’s best-film award, the Golden Bear. Their film, Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), defies categories. Set in Rome’s Rebibbia maximum security jail, this extraordinary hour and a quarter charts the making by inmates of a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Melancholia and The King’s Speech were the big winners at the European Film Awards in Berlin last night. Last year, Roman Polanski accepted The Ghost’s numerous awards in Tallinn by Skype, self-exiled by his deeds (and the fear of being clapped in irons by the US if he travelled). It was Lars von Trier’s words which kept him away as Melancholia won Best Film.

Ken Russell is, it seems, alive and well and directing Germans in Shakespeare. Actually, no, it's outgrown theatrical terrorist Thomas Ostermeier, but it might as well be our Ken to judge from the fitfully imaginative but repetitive images and the misappropriation of possibly fine actors. It seems old hat to us, but perhaps in two respects Londoners may strike Berliners as conservative. We still like our Hamlet in sequence - cut, usually, but with the expected beginning, middle and end.

It sounds Vietnamese. A wordless vocal floats above bowed strings. Chiming strings drift in, shimmering. Piano notes twinkle. Musical fog, it rolls in and is then suddenly gone. “In the Valley” opens Music for Confluence. It’s a perfect evocation of geography and environment.

You’ve got to love the “I Can Only Give You Everything” riff. Admiral Black do and base their “Got Love if You Want It” around an inverted version on their debut album. Cheese-wire fuzz guitar pulses, Bo Diddley drums bash and a wheezy organ, well, wheezes. From the borrowed title alone, it’s obvious where Admiral Back are coming from: classic Sixties-leaning rock. It's not all scuzz and psych though in the house of Black. “Madman’s Blues” drifts by in a haze and “Crystallised” begs for lighters in the air and a swaying audience.