37th season now booking! @LaSerenissimaUK @ECOrchestra @mozartplayers wind ensemble, @sofyagulyak @northernchords @CalidoreSQ and @heijden1990 with @JamsColeman … what a line up! Email concerts@mhvschool.co.uk to get full details or book on trybooking.com/uk/ETLX

Here's an extract from what is the most important column I have ever written, for @Telegraph: 'Opera has a BO problem' telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04… I can highly recommend the current run of Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House. To hear Mark Elder in the pit draw every nuance from Verdi’s wonderful score is a rare treat. To be accurate, however, I should say that I can recommend the first act, because I had to leave as soon as the curtain came down on it. I was gasping for breath, having spent that opening hour unable to take in a single proper, deep breath. The man on my left – smartly dressed, shiny shoes, trim haircut – had body odour (BO) so potent that it could have closed the Strait of Hormuz on its own. I’m not aware of any objective scientific studies on this, but as a regular opera and concert-goer, I’m convinced that the problem of BO is getting worse. Many decades ago I remember having to leave a Prom when the man I was sitting next to in the Royal Albert Hall amphitheatre was – well, let’s say – pungent. It was such a rare and scarring event that I recall everything about the concert that was being played in front of me – Murray Perahia playing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) and conductor Bernard Haitink – but I could take no pleasure from it as I was focused solely on trying not to pass out. The problem at concerts used to be people who behaved in public as if they were sitting on their sofa at home. There was a Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 – the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and Mariss Jansons at the Barbican – when the man in the row in front of me seemed to think he was the real conductor, waving his hands around so furiously that the entire hall must have been distracted. And then, in those passages when he decided the orchestra didn’t need his help, he started smooching with his neighbour. I assume they knew each other. When the problem is distraction you can at least do something about it and ask them to stop. Although I’m not sure we had it right when, as a student watching a performance of Boris Godunov, the man standing in front of me and my friend was breathing – wheezing – very heavily and loudly. “Excuse me,” my friend asked him. “But would you mind not breathing so much?” What can you say about BO, though? Short of asking them to leave, there is no way of dealing with it. I asked the usher the other night whether I could move seats, but it was a full house, so it was a matter of suffering or leaving. I was physically unable to stay next to the smell so I left. I’ve sat in every part of the Royal Opera House, along with the London concert halls. I can report that nowhere is safe. You’re now as likely to be snuffed out from BO in the cheap seats as in the ones for which you need to take out a mortgage to pay for a ticket. I’ve wondered why BO is becoming more prevalent. I’m struggling for a convincing explanation. I mean, can’t these people smell themselves, or is their stench so permanent that they don’t even notice it themselves? For what it’s worth, I think it may have something to do with the obsessiveness that is sometimes a trait of classical music fans – especially opera and even more especially Wagner, whose music seems particularly magnetic to the great unwashed. A lot of my fellow fans are, well…a bit odd. In that context, I have considered my other passion, football. I can’t recall ever encountering BO at a stadium. There is the fact it’s outside, which must help dissipate any stench. But we are packed in tightly, so I’m sure I’d notice it. All I can say is that BO is worse at the opera than at football. Perhaps it’s that football fans are a bit more cultured.

Thought for Good Friday .. @BBCRadio3 Why are there so few good recordings of the St John Passion in English? It’s time that @ChCh_Oxford or @NewCollegeChoir or King’s set a new standard for this great work.

It's been a long, lonely country lane but we finally have a National Trust director who accepts that my ethnicity means I'm too thick to know what to do, wear or how to behave in the countryside. How very condescending, I mean understanding, of her. Bravo! apple.news/AtTXYiBzJRlORcNiV…

So, bets on PMQs this week? Kemi: When did you find out Morgan McSweeneys phone had been stolen and what did you do to recover and secure the critical data on it? Starmer: We’ve announced a new breakfast club in Barnsley.

Happy memories of our St Patrick’s Day recital at @wigmore_hall last week!

Why? I don't follow you but I am sure plenty of decent people do, who don't want to move platforms. If you think Bluesky is all sweetness and light, you have been misinformed, even if its users see themselves as holier than thou...

Wonderful performances yesterday of Beethoven Octet, Gounod Petite Symphonie and Mozart Gran Partita. Much enjoyed by all. Thank you ! @mozartplayers

A glorious afternoon in Hastings for the Piano Competition semis ! Amazing standard. #HIPC with #RoryMacDonald conducting the takented young musicians of @SinfoniaSmithSq

Much looking forward to @ECOrchestra playing Holst, Britten, Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto and Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ on Sunday at 3.00 pm at MHV… @BBCRadio3 email concerts@mhvschool.co.uk for tickets.

Much looking forward to Northern Chords on Sunday 7th Dec at 3.00 pm Daniel Lebhardt, @AliceNeary @rosalindventris @BenjaminBakerVN play Mozart’s String Trio in E Flat, Schubert’s Rondo Brillant and the glorious Dvorak 2nd Piano Quartet! @BBCRadio3

A single parent with three kids currently gets £20,978 in benefits. Without the two-child cap, it would jump to £24,491 well above what a full-time minimum wage worker takes home - £21,807 (@thetimes). Why work at all if benefits pay more?

Delighted to welcome back the wonderful @CalidoreSQ to MHV concerts on Saturday at 3.00 pm Haydn, Barber and Dvorak’s ‘American’ Quartet! Can’t wait. A few returns available. Email concerts@mhvschool.co.uk if you’re in beautiful East Sussex.@BBCRadio3

We should build millions of these. Millions. So much of London is unremarkable and two storeys tall. We have the formula for nice looking gentle density. We’ve had it for centuries. It’s not rocket science. Build it up.

I have taken part in counter-demonstrations against the real far right. We were protesting against genuine Nazis and fascists - usually a rag bag of a few dozen skinheads doing the 'Sieg Heil'. If you think that today's march of over 150,000 was a 'far right' demonstration, you really need to reassess your entire political outlook.

Last night we opened the season at @rbo_org with a new production of #Tosca @AnnaNetrebko #FreddieDeTommaso #CarloBosi #OssianHuskinson #SipheKwani #AlessandroCorbelli #JakubHrůša #OliverMears 📷 ©2025 Marc Brenner

BBC News is doing a ‘Charlie Kirk Special’. My bet is that most of the country had no idea who Kirk was until he was shot dead yesterday.

Striking Tube staff on £73,000-a-year are also demanding two for one tickets to @LEGOLANDWindsor @THORPEPARK & Buckingham Palace. Thousands of hospital appts cancelled because these jokers want freebies. It's sick

My thoughts on Labour’s promise to build 1.5m net additional homes, when it was elected last summer, by August 2029. It implied an average of 300,000 a year over five years.  When Housing Minister Angela Rayner fell on her sword last week some Labour ministers praised her for getting off to a great start in meeting that target. But the stats don’t bear that out. Between July 2024, when Labour took office, and June 2025 Labour added 187,000 new homes in England — only 62% of the required annual run rate and well below the 221,000 the Tories managed in 2023/24.  This leaves Labour now having to add at least 325,000 new dwellings in the remaining four years — a tall order for the new housing minister Steve Reed.  Of course completions reflect some of Labour’s Tory inheritance. But the latest figures for starts don’t look encouraging. The Home Builders Federation says residential units approved in Q2 2025 were 23% down on Q2 last year. Social housing units were 31% lower and the 1,559 housing projects approved was 45% down on the year. That 1.5m target increasingly looks like mission impossible. Which isn’t just bad for housing but bad for the government’s growth strategy, which was meant to be spearheaded by a housebuilding boom.

This tube strike is a pain! Buses bursting and all the green bikes are gone ..