Billed as “a journey through painting and photography”, Capturing the Moment reveals many ways in which artists have responded to photography – either by taking up the camera themselves, as did Candida Höffer, Andreas Gursky, Louise Lawler and Thomas Struth, or by making some superb paintings.

Innovation is always a risky business. Opera North’s vision and ambition for this production is to create, in effect, a new genre: a combination of staged choral-orchestral performance with contemporary dance.

Partnership and diversity are the buzz words – good ones, too – and the concept brings together the opera company’s soloists, chorus and orchestra with dancers from both Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Theatre and South Africa’s Jazzart Dance Theatre, plus some help from Capetown Opera.

“Let the organ thunder!” is the sentiment a lot of us will associate with an orchestral concert featuring the king of instruments. The Hallé’s programme with Anna Lapwood as soloist (repeating, from her BBC Proms debut with them in 2021, the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony) seemed designed to evoke that thought.

But the organ in the Bridgewater Hall isn’t exactly made for thundering. Big Bertha it is not. What it is really good at is a light, clear and sometimes fiery sound – ideal for Poulenc’s 1939 Organ Concerto, which was the undoubted highlight of the evening.

It's fair to say that Pamfir, Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk's first feature, has been slightly overtaken by events.

The fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington on 14 June, 2017, with a death toll of 72, is still under investigation. The dead were largely recent immigrants to the UK. The tragedy, it’s clear now, was caused by an unholy mixture of neglect, racism, greed and corruption. There’s been much shameful denial and buck-passing, and the issues around the building’s shockingly inadequate cladding haven’t led to much action elsewhere.

London concert life is infinitely varied, especially if you dig below the surface. So after spending Tuesday evening in the lofty Royal Albert Hall, on Wednesday I was 16 metres below ground, in the tunnel shaft of the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe for a multi-media event celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, 62 years ago to the day.

An evening of “scenic orchestral works”, according to the programme booklet, was on offer from the BBC Philharmonic on Saturday. Scenic was certainly true of the Seven Early Songs of Alban Berg and Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. But Tom Coult’s Three Pieces That Disappear was something else.

Buildings can hold memories, the three dimensions of space supplemented by the fourth of time. Ten years ago, I started every working week with a meeting in a room that, for decades, had been used to conduct autopsies – I felt a little chill occasionally, as we dissected figures rather than bodies, ghosts lingering, as they do. 

A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece, Miss Julie. 

It’s been a good year for donkeys at the cinema. Not only did Martin McDonagh make a surprise star out of Jenny the miniature donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, but she’ll be competing at the Oscars with the title character of EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s paean to beautiful Sardinian donkeys. The veteran Polish director has crafted a film like no other, weaving together extraordinary images with a devastating score by Pawel Mykietyn.