Just over a decade ago it was predicted by those supposedly in the know that Ilan Volkov would succeed Sakari Oramo as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the event, the gig went to Andris Nelsons, and it was probably for the best.

Maggie Smith is not only a national treasure, but every casting director's go-to old bat. Now 84 years young, she is our favourite grande dame, or fantasy grandma.

How long does it take for grief to crystallise into art? No timetable can ever set that date. The poet George Szirtes’s mother took her own life, after previous attempts, during the hot summer of 1975 in the outer London suburbs where she lived. The fate of the woman born, as Magda Nussbächer, to a Hungarian Jewish family in Romania in 1924 has shadowed earlier sequences of poems by Szirtes. They dramatised, and imagined, scenes from his family history. Not until now, more than four decades after his loss, has the vast emptiness she left behind resolved into a prose memoir. 

The opening shot of Jan Němec’s 1964 debut feature, Diamonds of the Night, recalls the start of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.

When they were children the interviewees in this film – the last survivors – were taken away in incomprehensible circumstances, on their way to be murdered for who they were, in Germany and places further east.

Theatrical alchemy is eternally slippery.

This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his mistress Mrs Temes, upright headteacher Mr Elekes and his slovenly and unconventional wife Mrs Elekes.

Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the unloading of two boxes onto a horse drawn cart and start their long walk into town.

Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music was conducted by Mark Heron and given by members of Psappha with singers and musicians from the RNCM, directed by Stefan Janski.

Striking it lucky with a successful new opera is a rare occurrence, though every company has a duty to keep on trying. The Royal Opera hit the jackpot with 4.48 Psychosis, a highly original approach to Sarah Kane's profound and authentic play by Philip Venables, the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence on the scheme initiated by Covent Garden in alliance with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. How could one not wish his successor, Israel-born Na'ama Zisser, all the best?