Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Jessica Leary

Audiences have come to look forward to the annual co-production between Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where student opera singers, orchestra players and backstage crew get a chance to partner up with their professionals across the other side of Glasgow’s Hope Street.

Claudio Monteverdi was employed by Victor Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, but was dismissed from the court when his son Francesco Gonzaga took title in 1612. Monteverdi moved to Venice to take up the appointment of Director of Music at St Mark’s Basilica.

While on a wildlife safari holiday in the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana, Alexander McCall Smith asked his guides to take him across a river to where two primatologists were researching baboon behaviour. Baboons are matriarchal and uniquely in common with humans, high status is inherited.