Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone.

The terrace beside the restaurant in Cologne’s Stadtgarten – the city park – is heaving. Agreeably so. A bar and a food counter facing onto it are fringed by rows of long tables. Overhanging trees unite in a canopy suggesting this might be forest clearing. And despite the amount of people of all ages and despite the amount of the local Kölsch beer and the Riesling you’d expect in Rhine-straddling city flying around, the atmosphere is relaxed.

If only Liszt had started at the end of his Byron-inspired opera Sardanapalo. The mass immolation of Assyrian concubines might have been something to compare with the end of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Instead he only sketched out the first act, complete until nearly the end, and the inevitable comparisons with the Wagner of the late 1840s are not unfavourable by any means.

Like the Proms, but over a more concentrated time-span, in a much better concert hall and with a swankier audience paying a good deal more, the Lucerne Festival offers a summer parade of the world's greatest orchestras and conductors night after night. Hardly anywhere else, though, offers a home-assembled band of top players quite like the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, even if it will never be the same without Claudio Abbado.

This year’s nominees represent the wealth of innovative activity that makes British art, craft and design fresh and exciting. Artists and makers dominate the shortlist, and rightly so, but curators, an educator, and a journalist reflect the importance of public engagement with the visual arts, and the many ways in which this is achieved.

Theatre for children can often be dismissed – a box to tick for parents who want to keep up with cultural practices; a job for actors who haven't quite made it in the mainstream; theatre that mums and dads want to see that works for their little ones, too.

Asked to nominate the most important playwright in America since the war, theatregoers would probably plump for Arthur Miller, Edward Albee or David Mamet. But in terms of sheer popularity there is another candidate.

Forty thousand choirs in the UK! Choral directors of the UK rejoice. Voices Now have finally published the Big Choral Census. They’ve put hard data to something we knew was true: there are loads of choirs and loads of people who love singing in them. Finally we can present government with solid evidence that meaningful investment into the art form will be money well spent. Surely a cause for celebration? Yes... but not entirely.

I have many files, in bulging boxes and dusty corners of my computer, of projects that, for whatever reason, never came to fruition. To be honest I’ve forgotten most of them. And I wrongly assumed that The Enchanted Island would be one of those abandoned orphans. On the face of it the notion was fanciful. To make a complete opera out of a century of baroque music, with a new story and a new text in English.

Brits are the folk you expect to encounter the most in the rural-England-on-steroids of the beautiful Dordogne. In my experience they outnumber the French, at least in high summer, not just as visitors and retired homeowners but also as artisans selling their wares in Riberac's big Friday market.