A 22-room boutique hotel in north London, charging £18 ($29) a night for artists, has opened its doors to guests.

Green Rooms received special funding from the Mayo of London.

Book here, or send email to sales@greenrooms.london.

Pat Francis played her first concert with the San Diego Symphony in 1955, the youngest musician it ever hired. This weekend, she played her last.

Pat, at 77, bowed out with Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

She is the 9th longest serving orchestral musician on record.

Here’s what happened on Friday when Toronto named a lane after its former symphony conductor.

In the interest of research and good citizenship, Warner’s Melissa Lesnie attended an all-nighter of live – ahem – music by minimalists  Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds.

One of those nights when you just had to be there.

Read Melissa here.

Martin Senn, who stepped down at the end of last year as CEO of the giant Zurich insurance group, shot himself on Friday in the family’s Alpine home.

Senn, who was 59, was a prominent supporter of classical music causes and an influential member of the board of the Lucerne Festival. His Korean wife, a former concert violinist, survives him together with two adult children.

He left the company in December after a takeover bid fell through.

Stepping down after seven years with the Slovak Philharmonic, Emmanuel Vuillaume has spoken in a local interview of the loneliness of the long-distance conductor.

Technically, my home is now Paris, California and Dallas; but I am almost never there. So home is where my friends are, where good music is. But in some moments I have no home and this is very painful and difficult. I used to travel always with a book which was a prestigious collection of French poetry in a thousand pages, put together by Andre Gide. For a very long time, that felt home.

Read more here. Villaume is also music director of Dallas Opera and the Prague Philharmonia.

The incoming music director in Bratislava is James Judd.

In a major success for those trying to save the European Union Youth Orchestra from summary defunding by the EU commission, the Council of Ministers has agreed to review the issue at their meeting next Tuesday in Brussels.

Campaigners had been told it was impossible to get the item on the Council’s agenda at short notice, but the subject of the meeting is education, culture and sport and we understand that pressure from the Italian government, first and foremost, forced the topic onto the table.

There is no guarantee the ministers will reverse the commission’s decision or, if they do, that they commission won’t find some devious way to prevaricate. But this is an important step forward, a small glimmer of hope.