Luxury brand Loewe celebrates the brighter side of life with a new limited-edition collection, says Rebecca Gonsalves

The great Anthony Burgess used to live in Monaco. He was friendly with Princess Grace but wasn't wild about the Porsche-posing throng who hung out there. Asked how it felt to be "one of the Beautiful People", he replied, "Beautiful People? I have no time for those irrelevantly gilded with adventitious photogeneity".

It's a tribute to the power, variety and sheer quantity of music from the 17th and 18th centuries that the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music has not featured Vivaldi's The Four Seasons since 1990. The event, probably London's best-loved annual celebration of early music, has had plenty of other choices. This year, though, its artistic director, the music critic Lindsay Kemp, settled on the theme of “nature's voice” as the unifying strand. That opened the floodgates.

The Rijksmuseum, the National Museum of the Netherlands, is finally set to reopen to the public, with Rembrandt van Rijn's masterpiece "The Night Watch" reclaiming its place of pride.

In the Easter splurge of Bach, John Eliot Gardiner’s ‘marathon’ was always going to stand out, and it marked the culmination of a lifelong crusade.

It's rather apt that John Eliot Gardiner's marathon cycle of Bach cantatas should finally be completed with those written for Ascension Day, recorded at St Giles Cripplegate 12 years after the original “pilgrimage” recordings of 2000. The four cantatas feature mostly new soloists but sustain the series' high standards.

For three years, visitors to Buckland Abbey in Devon would have barely glanced twice at a portrait of Rembrandt hanging on the walls, believing it to be the work of one of the Dutch master's pupils.

Teen pop idol Justin Bieber is unlikely to be heard on highbrow Radio 3, but he will be this week when one of his hits gets a classical makeover. 

Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale is lending a touch of class to Comic Relief by appearing in a string of comedy sketches on Radio 3 about the lives of five great composers.

Heartthrob actor Dominic West is to go from The Hour to turning back the clock by reading a daily poem from the Baroque era for Radio 3.

The Bach Cantata Pilgrimage undertaken in 2000 by John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir, performing all of Bach's cantatas on the appropriate days in churches across Europe and America, is one of the great musical achievements of recent times.

We need to renew the language of remembrance. Even before state-funded commemorations of the First World War begin in 2014, a year of solemn preludes looms. Factor in the political push for exit from the EU, and on the national stage the warmer, more inclusive climate of the Olympic season may yield to a backward-looking, introspective mood: a chilling cult of the dead and the past.