Down by the seaside, an array of rather lumpen large naked women are marching, posing, reclining, and even rolling over along the walls of the new Jerwood Gallery, delineated by William Scott (1913-1989). Scott’s centenary is being commemorated with an array of exhibitions and publications in Britain and America, and the market too is revving up with the publication of a four-volume catalogue of his oil paintings.

Vladimir Jurowski deemed this the most challenging of any programme in the Southbank’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival and proceeded to tell us precisely why. That his little preamble lasted almost twice as long as the first piece - Webern’s Variations for Orchestra Op.30 - was an indicator of just how scientific the thinking behind his programme was. Jurowski instinctively understands how and why works impact on each other in the way they do.

Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite capable of tearing at our heartstrings. That they did so unremittingly last night was very largely due to the supernaturally beautiful sounds master conjuror Stéphane Denève drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70^th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.

Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. “England’s Dramatist”, as the newspapers christened him, produced more than 20 plays spanning the length of his career, outdoing contemporaries Shaw and Rattigan for popular and critical success. But his was not an enduring fame, and with his work now strikingly absent from the theatrical repertoire, any revival must inevitably face the suspicious question: why?

When Schoenberg made his steroidal orchestration of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet he saw and heard what many don’t - that Brahms was more of a radical than the music world was ready to acknowledge, that he was not the conservative in the shadow of Wagner that commentators at the time felt the need to brand him.

We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?

This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.

Watching Mr Selfridge has been like one of those whirlwind tours with the refrain, “It’s Tuesday, so it must be Rome”. Episodes have been defined by the drop-in appearances of Blériot and his aeroplane, Conan Doyle and the séance, Mr FW Woolworth and the like. They've succeeded one another like the purring Monsieur Leclair’s window displays, leaving ongoing interest in character in the shade.

Curious and curiouser. Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto, centrepiece of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s latest Philharmonia concert celebrating the Polish master’s centenary, adds ballast to the idea that the composer, like Schoenberg and Tippett, burrowed into a specially comfortless rabbit warren in his later works. On the other hand his Concerto for Orchestra, begun two decades earlier in 1950, proved its mettle as a serious audience-pleaser.