Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.

Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”

The ballerina claque wars that generally accompany visits here by the Mariinsky Ballet are raging particularly feverishly this year, but it all falls silent when Uliana Lopatkina makes one of her increasingly rare appearances. So much noise is focused on legginess or hip flexibility of these size-zero ballerinas, and yet the Mariinsky knows more than any other company in history that it is not body but mind that matters in the final analysis. Their luminous historical legend Galina Ulanova was nothing to look at physically, until she started dancing.

Following theartsdesk's Monday opinion piece on reasons for moving towards a boycott on Valery Gergiev's concerts, and in the general climate created by other reports and protests, the conductor has issued the following statement, to which David Nice responds with an open letter.

Valery Gergiev's statement

Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India.

The Mikhailovsky Ballet closed their epic two-week Coliseum season with modern works by their director, Nacho Duato, presumably hoping to display their capabilities at all dance forms. Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness is a work in two acts first created for the Weimar Arts Festival in 1999. Duato used Bach’s canon throughout, focusing on concertos and orchestral suites in the first part (14 pieces), and compositions for organ with further excerpts from The Art of Fugue in the second (seven pieces).

The Mikhailovsky Ballet's general director, Russia's fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, may just have been declared bankrupt, but the company is pressing ahead with its star-studded London trip in March. 

Fraud investigators last week raided the offices of the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s “other” company (ie, not the Mariinsky), looking for connections between Kekhman's business activities and the theatre. Nearly six years ago the "Banana King" became the 180-year-old theatre’s general director and donated a billion rubles to fix its crumbling walls and renovate its programme.

An apocryphal story tells of an awful theatrical adaptation of the story of Anne Frank. When the Nazis arrive to search the house where the family are in hiding, an enraged theatre-goer shouts, “She’s in the attic!” Well, I didn’t quite point Anna Karenina to the train station, but the thought crossed my mind.

No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride," according to the masterly New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay. Both views come from Englishmen working in America, hence a contradictory weathervane as to how his ballets will be received in Britain on this tour.

Bartók: Violin Concerto No 2, Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto Valeriy Sokolov Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich/David Zinman (Virgin)

The Nikolai Ge retrospective at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery marks the 180^th anniversary of the artist’s birth – not the kind of round centenary or bicentenary landmark that often brings such projects to fruition. But the show is literally a revelation – at its centre are the religious works from the last years of his life, many of which returned only this year to Russia from abroad. A series of pencil drawings based on the Crucifixion show the artist working in a style that seems astonishingly ahead of his time.