This weekend's classical highlights comprise an eloquent tribute to a 20th-century master, entertaining cabaret songs from Weimar-era Berlin and some sublime Bruckner choral music recorded by an Edinburgh choir.

Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in lockstep and Nazi banners unfurling from windows would all be on it. If there is, Christopher and His Kind last night was following it - but then it also wrote it.

Christopher Isherwood is responsible as much as anyone for our perceptions of the period, but after decades of cinematic and theatrical adornments and encounters in this mode, a production of Isherwood's memoir cannot help but seem hackneyed, a victim of its own style. Still, returning to the source (in Kevin Elyot's adaptation) at least allows us to understand that before the style there was a story.

The story, rather depressingly, is of a one-man universe, of the complete selfishness of Isherwood (Doctor Who's Matt Smith) amid decadence and disaster in Berlin. It is a wildly unsympathetic part: Isherwood cannot see the world beyond his penis. The film shows this very well, both in the vivid yet unerotic sex scenes (this film will be heaven for Doctor Who slash fiction fans) and in the whirling and unexpected camera angles, which replicate the novelty and horror of everything to Isherwood, who is unworldly - or uninterested.

Isherwood is politically uninterested, certainly - despite great chunks of exposition from other characters (your heart falls when you get another GCSE history class) and their urgent moral opinions, Isherwood fails to stir himself at the rise of the Nazis, and even seeing the Nazis beat up someone hardly motivates him. He checks out a Nazi at an adjacent urinal, for God's sake. A wealthy Jew challenges him about opting out from "the messy business of living" in favour of art.

It takes a bravura scene of book-burning for him to contemplate the "shame, shame" he mutters about: both the Nazis' and his own. The scene works so well because, although we often hear about it, the dragging of carts of books, the enthusiasm of the arsonists, the random pages of books thrown up into the night sky on the force of the fire are rarely as vivid to us. (Having Wilde and Mann's books on the pyre, licked by flames, was probably overdoing it.)

But even after this it seems that he is emotionless. He cannot understand how his boyfriend will not leave Berlin and his brother - Isherwood found it easy enough to leave his own brother with their shrewish mother. He wants to get his boyfriend out of Germany, but confesses to being slightly relieved when he is deported from England, facing an uncertain fate. Matt Smith is able to take on the unpleasantness, even the deadness, of his interior as Isherwood appears more of a monster, and every time his heart does not break, Smith manages to make him look almost sorry for it.

Imogen Poots plays Jean Ross, the inspiration for Sally Bowles, and when they meet in Knightsbridge before the war, she flashes him her copy of his book, glad that he has cannibalised her life, just like he has turned Toby Jones's preening queen into literary fodder. Like much of the rest of the film, and Isherwood confesses this at the start and towards the end, we are watching his memories, not fact, and only in his mind could Ross feel this way. Poots and Jones humiliate Smith in their emotional shading, but Smith never stood a chance by pouring himself into this chilling man, even though he does so convincingly.

Isherwood leaves, and not just Berlin - he goes to California. In a late scene in his Seventies Californian apartment, he confesses that he was isolated but says that he was helping the cause of gay rights without realising it at the time (by screwing a series of models from Vogue tableaux, according to this film). In his political, financial, social, sexual safety, this comes across as base self-justification a million years and a million miles after he fled. I suspect the director wants us to have some sympathy for Isherwood, with a touching shot of a meaningful Berlin-era clock, but after this film, sympathy is denied to the man who denied sympathy to all others.

So the Berlin Phiharmonic’s high-profile five-day residency staked its ultimate curtain-calls on one of the most spiritual adagio-finales in the symphonic repertoire (most of the others, like this one to the Third Symphony, are by Mahler). We knew the masterful Sir Simon's micromanagement and the Berlin beauty of tone would look to the first five movements of the Third's world-embracing epic. But would the sixth flame, as it must, with pulsing inner light and strength of long-term line?

Another 400 films, another rush for seats, another biting wind from Vladivostock: the 61st Berlin Film Festival - the Berlinale - has packed ’em in in the centre of town at Potsdamer Platz (mainly) over the last 10 days and hoped to light up the inevitably gloomy middle of February, and almost succeeded. But boy were there some tedious competition films this year.

From that moment in 1903 when audiences fled screaming from the Lumière brothers’ L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, convinced they would be crushed under the wheels of the oncoming train, 3D cinema staked its claim as the genre of sensation and sensationalism. The format has spent over a century circling quietly in and out of favour; then came Avatar and everything changed. Overnight 3D film went from technological curiosity to mainstream innovation. Suddenly everyone was talking. With Sanctum currently oozing gore all over our screens, the first 3D opera screenings looming and no self-respecting child accepting animated 2D substitutes, the conversation is buzzing louder than ever – but is it ever going to get to the big questions?

Just seconds into a performance by the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil Teresa Carreño it is immediately clear what Sir Simon Rattle meant when he said, “I have seen the future of music.” The passion and physical and mental energy with which they play, along with the sheer joy they seem to glean from it, is enough to instill hope in even the staunchest cultural pessimist.

No woman has ever achieved a higher profile on the French horn than Sarah Willis. Why? It's not as if she is a renowned soloist. But she is the first and only woman to join the brass section of the world's most celebrated and widely followed orchestra. It will be no surprise if this Saturday the BBC cameras as usual pick her out from row upon row of Teutonic males in the second of the Berlin Philharmonic’s two Prom 2010 appearances. But in addition to her Berliner duties, this year Willis has stepped out from under the orchestra’s giant shadow for the first time.

First, the name. There’s no family link between the 57-year-old German composer and Hitler’s Doctor Death. This Goebbels cuts an impressive figure. Solidly built, with thick white hair and slightly cherubic features, and speaking fluent English, he’s above all accessible and unpretentious. Today, in Germany especially, but also abroad - in the States and Britain, where his renown is growing - the name Heiner Goebbels evokes not hatred but magical stage ambiences, lyrical and parodic song, strange music and hypnotic dance: new wonders from a new Germany.