We're extremely happy to be able to offer a free download of this live track by New York collective Mice Parade to mark the release of their seventh album, Candela, today. In its six minutes, this version of "Couches & Carpets" encapsulates much of the diversity that has made Mice Parade a cult act over the past decade - from indie introspection to expansive post-rock guitars, jazz-funk grooves to melodies and techniques influenced by anagramatically eponymous band leader Adam Pierce's wide research as an ethnomusicologist. 

We're pleased to announce The Arts Desk is a media partner of the Denovali Swingfest London on 20 and 21 April at London's The Scala. It's a good match, as Swingfest and the Denovali label, like The Arts Desk refuse to acknowledge artificial boundaries between “high” culture, the avant-garde and grassroots electronic and club music.

The Russian superstar ballerina Natalia Osipova is to join the Royal Ballet, the Royal Opera House announced today. The 26-year-old Moscow ballerina, who made her name as a wunderkind in the Bolshoi Ballet until she quit two years ago, signed a contract last month but held back the news until the end of the London tour of her current company, the Mikhailovsky Ballet, reports Russian daily Kommersant.

General booking for the Bolshoi Ballet's Covent Garden season this summer opens on Tuesday (9 April), and the company has at last announced its intended casting. However, it should always be borne in mind that, as Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo habitually announce before every performance, "in accordance with strict Russian tradition, there may be changes".

Even visitors from distant galaxies will be aware that, when it comes to the arts, state munificence is not what it was. Cuts are biting deep into an industry which is not always able to provide facts and figures in support of its importance to national wellbeing. When public money runs dry, the only other source is private wealth. But even sponsors and benefactors are feeling the pinch these days, so a new initiative has been announced to address the problem by going directly to consumers of the arts.

Is the Bolshoi Ballet going to have trouble selling its tickets for its London tour as a result of the acid attack on its artistic director Sergei Filin? A range of opinion is erupting among ballet-goers dismayed not only by the attack but by the exposure of vicious infighting inside the Moscow troupe and the subsequent public developments.

Regular readers of theartsdesk will know that we have a lot of time for Volker Bertelmann, the composer-pianist-producer better known as Hauschka. Adapting styles from rigorous minimalism through romantic compositions to club-inspired electronica, he has ploughed his own furrow through postclassical and leftfield music.

When Sadler's Wells 10th Flamenco Festival opens tomorrow night with thudding heels, swirling skirts and wailing voices, some will sit there begging to know what the wailing is about. Dancers like Eva Yerbabuena and Israel Galván, singers like Estrella Morente, reach us deep in some inexpressible place with their performance, but their passion is driven by the evocative poetry of a powerful oral tradition going back some three centuries.

So the man who specialises in dancing Bolshoi ballet villains has been arrested and confessed to the infamous attack on his boss, Sergei Filin. But today Pavel Dmitrichenko, well-known to Bolshoi audiences for playing Ivan the Terrible, one of Russia's more pitiless Tsars, showed an equally Tsarist haughtiness when he made his first appearance in a Moscow court. He had nothing to apologise for, he said, even though it's emerging that at the very least Filin, a 42-year-old father of three, will never see normally again and his future employment must be in doubt.

There is much anguish in some quarters at the news that the BBC has axed The Hour, the Abi Morgan-penned series for BBC Two about the workings of a 1950s current affairs TV programme based at the Corporation's old studios at Lime Grove. A BBC spokeswoman said: "We loved the show [yes, clearly] but have to make hard choices to bring new shows through." The news came as a blow to producers Kudos, who had anticipated making a third series, and the company's chief executive Jane Featherstone was "sad and disappointed".