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.

The Sapporo Symphony Orchestra had already scheduled a London appearance as part of its 50th-anniversary tour when the Japanese earthquake and tsunami struck. Now all proceeds from the Royal Festival Hall concert on 23 May will go directly to the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Japan Society Tohoku Earthquake Relief Fund.

Published in 1987, Norwegian Wood was the novel that turned Haruki Murakami from writer to celebrity in his native Japan. With over 12 million copies sold internationally and a cult of devoted readers waiting fretfully, the notoriously unfilmable book finally makes its screen debut under the direction of Tran Anh Hung. Described by the author simply as “a love story”, this most conventional of Murakami’s narratives picks through the emotional detritus of a teenage suicide, exposing the strands of grief and sexuality that bind our hero Watanabe to the women in his life.

It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.

To achieve a black stage that emits or reflects no light is a hell of an achievement. To place a huge black horse with black rider onto that stage, without the slightest noise, and to contrive a black shadow on the black, is to create an image found in the fathomless wells of subconscious imagery, and the skill of that vision and realisation of it is something I doubt I'm going to forget.

At 25 years old, Jonathan Miller’s Mikado may be more Grande Dame than ingénue, but it still has a Charleston kick in its step and a shimmy in its pearls. Styled and stylised, chic and slick, it's as far from the operetta’s ubiquitous am-dram incarnations as from the Japan of the original. Yet just as the Minimalist decor and monochrome palette of an Art Deco interior prove unforgiving to the smallest hint of dust or casual clutter, so the sharp lines of this production provide little cover for the relaxed paunch or middle-aged spreadings of a revival.

Based on a novel by Kanae Minato, Tetsuya Nakashima’s provocative, serenely sinister thriller is fuelled by the murderous desire of its teens and the righteous anger of their teacher. Best known for the inebriated mania of Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, in Confessions Nakashima trades his outrageous rainbow hues for a distinctly funereal aesthetic. It’s as if a dark veil has been drawn across his signature style, with the film bowed in sombre recognition of its troubling subject matter.

Complicite’s Shun-kin delivers sex and violence aplenty. A warped, wilfully kinky fusion of the two lies at the core of the play and its central relationship – sexy, edgy material with just the right degree of poetry to help smooth its way across the sophisticated palate of London’s theatre-goers. Yet to dwell on this is both to misunderstand and misrepresent Simon McBurney’s generous drama.

It’s pretty hard to describe a Forced Entertainment show. But let’s try anyway: imagine a stage full of crazy dancers, the men in black wigs, the women in white ones, prancing around, flinging their arms in the air, mistiming their high kicks, and then running frantically up and down the stage. The lighting slides from bright white to sick pink, and the music is pop tunes with Japanese lyrics. Welcome to a wonderful world of controlled zany exhilaration.