Despite a varied career encompassing almost six decades of film, television and stage work, Nicholas Courtney will always be remembered for one role above all others.

Tailor-made for Hilary Hahn's cool, brilliant sound, Jennifer Higdon's 2008 Violin Concerto has the swagger of an established favourite.

Few singers can boast of a career lasting more than 65 years; Hugues Cuénod was one who could, but the Swiss tenor was in every way an extraordinary artist. Fluent in six languages, he had an unusually wide range of sympathies spanning four centuries, from Dowland, Monteverdi and Bach, to Berg, Honegger and Stravinsky, encompassing every type of vocal music from café chantant to oratorio. Equally at home putting across popular songs with Jane Laquien, as the duo "Bob et Bobette", or singing Satie's Socrate in the salon of the Princesse de Polignac, he had not one but several careers, as concert singer, recitalist, musical-comedy artiste, teacher and as a superb operatic character tenor. These careers overlapped each other, but after the Second World War the character tenor became the most important and successful.

Black Swan shows ballerinas as obsessive, mysterious creatures. We do the artform a disservice with this much-peddled myth, says ex-dancer Alice-Azania Jarvis

Though English National Ballet's new Nutcracker is a long-awaited production, it seems to have been rushed on to the stage. It has handsome designs, Tchaikovsky's score and some strong dancing, but suffered a case of first-night nerves. Some dances were under-rehearsed; at least one special effect went awry. The production and company need to take a deep breath and calm down.

Andris Nelsons' remarkable ear for orchestral colour is put to the test in this bold pairing of Tchaikovsky's Sixth with Romeo and Juliet. The fantasy overture is the more natural fit for the 32-year-old conductor.

If it's Christmas, it must be The Nutcracker: Clara and her wooden soldier doll are our constant companions during a season otherwise observed in ever different ways. At English National Ballet, which has danced the work every December for the past 59 years, the latest version of the Hoffmann classic opens on Friday for 32 performances at the Coliseum in London, the company's Christmas home.

As the concerto that everyone knows – put to a myriad showbiz uses, including the Olympic torch relay in Moscow, and the credit sequence for ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ – Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 might be thought to have been worked to death, but its allure stays evergreen.

Some excellent short essays in this volume help to explain the nature of translation and its problems and challenges, almost as well as do the translated poems, laid side by side with their originals. My favourite was Sasha Dugdale's account of translating William Blake into Russian with a group of students in a town just outside Moscow. How to get across the sense of a self-taught poet at odds with tradition? Dugdale struggles with their lack of reverence for the originals, and one woman's rewriting of "The Sick Rose" almost breaks Dugdale's heart.

For once, the hate mail was not forthcoming. Given that any mention of non-essential spending in this column tends to be greeted with a flurry of "well aren't you jammy!" emails, I had thought that talk of a not-at-all-necessary, entirely indulgent, £65 ballet ticket would guarantee at least one negative response. Apparently not. Not so much as a peep.