Performer: Jamie Rock

A great return appearance for English Touring Opera's Puccini double bill opening its spring tour at the Hackney Empire.

The charm-ometer was cranked firmly to ‘high’ yesterday evening for the opening opera of this year’s Buxton Festival with a performance of The Jacobin, an opera close to Dvořák’s heart. 

British Youth Opera have been fostering the best of young British vocal talent for 25 years, and it’s a delight to see them celebrating their anniversary this year with a work precisely as old as they are: Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera dates from 1987, and made for a lively showcase for these rising stars at London’s Peacock Theatre last night.

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.