It would be tough for any Russian ballet company to come into worldly, balletwise London just ahead of the great Bolshoi, but the Mikhailovsky Ballet make a very pleasing impression in their first week at the Coliseum with a pretty and historically interesting Swan Lake and a gently antique Giselle, and dancing that more than most underscores the rare pleasures of period style.

Give any masterpiece of classical music a central role in a film - and everything else straightaway faces the highest standards of comparison. In Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert, it's the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and from the opening frames the music delivers everything it should – though whether it’s enough to hide other noises (clunking in the script department being only one of them) is another matter.

You need very little for a Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky’s music, white swan-girls, a mooning boy, and 32 fouettés for the ballerina in black. That's about it, isn't it? Every traditional Swan Lake we see now is a sort of balletic pizza - a musical base scattered with ingredients collected from a familiar buffet, piled up by its stager or so-called choreographer according to taste (and often a large measure of vanity for sauce).

The Bolshoi Ballet and its London promoters have confirmed wholesale casting changes to the Covent Garden tour starting next Monday, due to the last-minute absence of prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. Zakharova was due to give six performances, but has withdrawn due to a hip injury, it is said. Her partner the celebrated male star Nikolai Tsiskaridze has withdrawn from Giselle, and appearances by another senior ballerina Maria Alexandrova have also been reduced.

The Bolshoi Ballet and its London promoters have confirmed wholesale casting changes to the Covent Garden tour starting next Monday, due to the last-minute absence of prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. Zakharova was due to give six performances, but has withdrawn due to a hip injury, it is said. Her partner the celebrated male star Nikolai Tsiskaridze has withdrawn from Giselle, and appearances by another senior ballerina Maria Alexandrova have also been reduced.

One of the greatest pianists (and latterly conductors) of his generation, founder and artistic director of the Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev, has been charged by Thai police with raping a 14-year-old boy, according to the BBC. Police also raided his Thai home in connection with a paedophile ring and found, say prosecutors, several "compromising" photographs with underage boys.

Note to lovers of those periodic lists of all-time international cultural landmarks: I seem to remember that Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth once came in at number 82 in one such “best films ever” critical appraisal. Though that may place it somewhere in the lower third division, its release on the Mr Bongo label is a very welcome event if, like me, you probably last saw it decades ago on a bad 16-mm copy.

Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two hours before the announcement, the judges were still undecided but the white smoke moment saw Bartana’s two films (part of an ongoing trilogy) land the cheque.

"Russia has a remarkable and ancient tradition of wooden buildings that dates back to the tenth century, with the remains of Medieval fortresses demonstrating the sophistication of the Nordic wooden construction methods employed across Russia and Scandinavia at the time. In the 18th century Peter the Great’s policy of broader cultural engagement between Russia and the rest of Europe stimulated cultural influence both to and from Russia, finding its way into the rich urban and architectural language of the time.