We're living through a golden age of Bruckner conducting. A revolutionary age. Young sparks like Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Ilan Volkov are doing extraordinary things with the Austrian's music, experimenting with speeds and phrasing, reshaping him in a more extraterrestrial, more lithe and modern mould. All of which means that trying to get yourself noticed conducting Bruckner in the 2010s is a bit like trying to get yourself noticed as a footballer in 1970s Brazil. Good luck.

In 1997 the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist produced one of the most delightful videos ever made, and it won her the Biennale. Ever is Over All shows a young woman skipping down a city street gaily smashing car windows with a red-hot poker; and since it is shaped like a knobkerry, the flower makes a surprisingly convincing weapon. Oh dear, though, here comes a policewoman; but instead of admonishing or arresting the vandal, the bobby gives her an encouraging smile, salutes and walks on by. 

There’s more than one way to reinterpret or simply embrace the extraordinary wealth of Ethiopian music that Francis Falceto has given us with the still growing Ethiopiques CD series of 1970s Ethio-jazz (as the style has been inadequately labelled). For example, Dub Colossus were seduced by the dissimulating aspect of the music that they felt it shared with dub reggae. And the Heliocentrics embraced its “otherness” over which they imposed their own art-school sensibility. Somewhere between these two approaches comes Switzerland’s Imperial Tiger Orchestra.

Brahms composed trios throughout his life - these well-loved pieces contrast with the much rarer works of Hans Gal and the oboist Heinz Holliger, here exposed in his parallel career as a composer.

Brahms Piano Trios, Horn Trio, Clarinet Trio Soloists of Villa Musica (Covellio Classics)

Think what you will about Switzerland and the Swiss – calm, ordered country, treasured environment, cautious, democratically precise people – but look behind the scenes and things can seem quite scary. Vol spécial (Special Flight), by Swiss-French-speaking Fernand Melgar, is one of the most intense documentaries I have ever seen. Depicting asylum seekers in a detention centre, it is a vibrant portrait of human (entirely male) endeavour warping into despair under an unkind but, as the Swiss see it, necessary law of repatriation: in 1994, they voted for what is known as the federal law on coercive measures. Few citizens today know about it.

I’m standing with my feet on peaks and my head in clouds, looking down steep Alps at the tiny chocolate-brown chalets of little Verbier way below on the green slopes. It’s ravishing up here on the top of Fontanet, and I tarry, gloating over the botanical riches around me of milky-blue gentians, royal-blue harebells, glistening edelweiss, dark little orchids and garnet-bright sedum, watching the trickling water of a brook, and replaying last night’s music in my head. And if you move quick you can do this yourself before next Sunday.

Being a choreographer is harder than it looks. Steps, movement, are just the beginning. On top of that you need to have a sense of theatricality, and then, even more, you need to be able to convey your ideas, through movement alone, to the audience. On these counts, Bern:Ballett’s visit to the Linbury fails to make the grade.

Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This is the indispensable clickable guide to a cultured break in Europe.

If you’re looking for a surprising and off-the-wall show this school holidays, I’ve no hesitation in hugely recommending Chouf Ouchouf, a brilliantly and theatrically inventive acrobat theatre show performed by the Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier, a troupe of Moroccan acrobats who learned their awesome skills on Tangier Beach. Through the wit and imagination of its Swiss theatre directors, the show manages to retain a lively street smell and yet pull off some deft theatrical effects, blurring the edges between normality and strangeness - one moment you feel you might be walking in a souk, the next you’ve been sucked into a darkling, ghostly world of surreal human balancing acts.