The Basel Chamber Orchestra’s 21 string players on tour are an extraordinary set of musicians. Not only did they begin their programme in Manchester with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, requiring at times one-to-a-part playing to accomplish its multi-voice textures, but eight of them put down their instruments and transformed into a choir for the piece that followed.

The Biba dresses are way too colourful, the shop’s interior about 10 times too bright… and did anybody really say ”happening threads” in 1965?

There are times when it’s best to know as little as possible before taking one’s seat for a show – this new production of Rebecca would be a perfect such example.

Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: searing is a regular participant, as is honest, and urgent, and unflinching. All of these words share a common indistinctness; each appeals to timeliness and/or some kind of apparent bravery; and each actually means extremely little.

Mark Cousins pulled off a coup for his latest film history documentary, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, by getting the great director to narrate it. In his catarrhal East London drawl, Hitchcock parses dozens of the brilliant visual techniques he used to elicit emotional responses in his movies' audiences, as Cousins cuts rapidly from one memorable excerpt to another. Quite a feat since Hitchcock died 43 years ago.

The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity.

There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre?

Sir Mark Elder has a special affection for the music of Elgar. They share a birthday, on 2 June, and his time with the Hallé has included more than one celebration of the composer at this time of year.

For a masterclass in expansive adaptation, one could do worse than turn to Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain, based on American author Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same title. Proulx’s restrained but searing tale of the queer romance between two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming generated in Lee's 2005 film a tragedy of deep interiority and complex emotion.

As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London.