Conductors know what to do when a phone goes off in their concert. It’s called the Alan Gilbert gambit.

In Dayton, Ohio, they are used to ringing phones. But when a baby started cying in the flute solo of Debussy’s L’Apres-midi d’un faun, conductor Neal Gittelman had  enough.

Read on here.

‘We have been through a war together these past few weeks,’ says Keith Warner, in a full and frank explanation of why he quit – twice – as head of the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. And it’s not just the Government cuts, he adds, though they were the trigger to his decision.

‘The cuts are a meaningless act of vandalism,’ says Keith, ‘the equivalent of taking a flick-knife to the Mona Lisa. ‘

Aside from the cuts, running the theatre meant taking countless ‘decisions over which I am given shallow choices, little real control and absolutely no respect.’ He paints a picture of political and administrative manipulation.

Don’t believe Borgen, Denmark’s gripping TV political drama. The reality is much worse. Read Keith’s passionate, defeated letter here.

It has been standard practice in the entertainment industries for as long as we’ve been around that a good review is raw promotion. It gets posted far and wide and serves to attract paying customers and further engagements.

So imagine the consternation of German singer Peter Schöne when two fine and appreciative reviews that he posted on his site landed him with lawyer letters from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sueddeutsche, demanding that he cease and desist from using their copyright material and that he cough up a four-figure fine for improper use.

I hope Peter’s lawyers will tell them where to shove it, but I wonder who tipped off the newspaper lawyers in the first place.

It’s not the sort of thing they would have noticed spontaneously. Might it have been one or both of the critics who felt their high integrity was being compromised by Peter’s promotional usage?

Read on here in Moritz Eggert’s German blog for the full story.