A drawing by James Ensor (1860-1949) on loan from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp has been stolen while on show in the municipal museum in The Hague. “The Triumph of Death” was part of an exhibition that ended last week, when the theft was discovered. A similar drawing was recently sold for €132,000 in Amsterdam. Police are investigating.

Travellers on the Brussels metro will soon be able to listen to songs in both French and Dutch, after the public transport authority MIVB decided to reverse an earlier decision to play only music in English, Spanish and Italian to avoid language disputes. Managers will now devise a quota system to determine how the songs are shared. Music after 21.00 will continue to be drawn from the classical canon.

The Bronks youth theatre in Brussels has become the first-ever Belgian nomination for the Mies Van der Rohe Award, the European Union prize for contemporary architecture. The building on Varkensmarkt, striking for its liberal use of glass, was designed by the MDMA partnership of Martine De Maeseneer and Dirk Van den Brande and opened in 2009. The prize was won by British architect David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin.

Peter De Caluwe, directorgeneral of De Munt opera house in Brussels, has been nominated for a second term in the post, running until 2019, on a unanimous vote of the board of directors. De Caluwe, who came to De Munt in 2007, was born in Landen, Flemish Brabant, and previously worked at De Munt in the 1980s under Gerard Mortier.

The management of Antwerp’s premier concert venue, the Sportpaleis, last week unveiled plans for a complete renovation of the venue, which will add 5,000 new seats and bring safety and comfort up to the latest standards. The work will be carried out during the summer over the next three years, to be completed in 2014.