The young casualty of genius fires imaginations and fills coffers. Last year Dylan Thomas’s centenary was vastly celebrated. The Amy Winehouse industry is still shifting units. The spell cast by Sylvia Plath seems not to diminish. A Janis Joplin biopic project is staggering through the law courts. And then there are Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all the sundry other singers and poets who, by accident or design, cut themselves down in their prime.

For all the wrong reasons, the work of Dexter Dalwood serves as a useful metaphor for this exhibition. Trite, tokenistic and desperate to look clever, Dalwood’s paintings are as tiresomely inward-looking as the show itself, which is a dismal example of curatorial self-indulgence at the expense of public engagement.

What a difference seven years can make to a budding genius. Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (1775) has only patches of brilliance, and last year’s Glyndebourne production, despite musical excellence, failed them all.

It is irresistible to watch Andrew Roberts, the ambitious historian of one of history's most ambitious figures, narrating a three-part account of his hero’s life and times. He is giving us a superb analysis of Napoleon Bonaparte’s gifts, flaws, insecurities and achievements. 

Between Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Everyman it was beginning to look like we were never going to get a proper, uncomplicated laugh in Rufus Norris’s National Theatre. Thank goodness for Restoration comedy, stepping into the breach as reliably as it did with The Man of Mode in 2007 (who could forget Rory Kinnear’s Sir Fopling Flutter?). Throwing everything and the ancestral silver at the play, director Simon Godwin delivers an evening generous with wit, joy and affection.

This penultimate night of the London (formally Lufthansa) Festival of Baroque Music brought beautiful, intelligent, superbly musical singing from two sopranos Julia Doyle and Grace Davidson, who sang early 18th century works by François Couperin: two exultatory motets, a Magnificat and the Leçons de Ténèbres.

At just 26, Pippa Bennett-Warner has already achieved many actors’ goals, from treading the boards at the National and having a part written specially for her to sharing scenes with luminaries like Derek Jacobi and Eddie Redmayne. She debuted aged 11 as one of the young Nalas in The Lion King, but since graduating from RADA, she has focussed on “straight acting”.

Over the past decade Alice Coote has emerged as a singer of rare and exquisite vocal quality. Even when the direction of a project is questioned, there has generally been consensus that she generally sounds gorgeous. The concept of Being Both, a juxtaposition of Handel mezzo arias for both male and female characters, is brilliant both musically and commercially. It allows a fascinating exploration of identity and sexuality in a period when both, in opera, were pretty fluid; and it makes, conveniently, for a programme of Handel’s greatest hits.

Fusion between Christian Venice and the Ottoman east started up at least as early as the 15th century, accompanied by a superb portrait of Sultan Mehmet II attributed to Gentile Bellini (pictured below). So what Egyptian-born oud (read oriental lute) player Joseph Tawadros and that febrile Australian Richard Tognetti with members of the Academy of Ancient Music in cheerful tow were trying to do last night had honourable precedents. Their vibrant mix turned out to be exactly the sort of high level east-west happening not on the programme of this year’s Proms.