Bbc concert orchestra

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Where are all my after-dinner speaking gigs?

How excited are you to hear the Prime Minister talking tech with Eric Schmidt, an American billionaire who used to run Google? Me neither. But their on-stage conversation is billed as the highlight of the government’s International Investment Summit in London next week, designed to show the world the UK is ‘open for business’. What with Downing Street looking like Game of Thrones after the Red Wedding massacre, and both Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill and Rachel Reeves’s tax-grab Budget looming, the timing of this summit could hardly be worse. A month ago there were rumours it was in disarray, with doubts whether it could attract a quorum of global

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Opera della Luna is a little miracle: Curtain Raisers at Wilton’s Music Hall reviewed

Arthur Sullivan knew better than to mess with a winning formula. ‘Cox and Box, based on J. Maddison Morton’s farce Box and Cox’ reads the title page of his first comic opera, composed to a libretto by F.C. Burnand a good five years before he latched up with W.S. Gilbert. ‘Those boys hit on a brilliant idea,’ Billy Wilder is supposed to have said when he saw the musical that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black had created from his movie Sunset Boulevard. ‘They didn’t change a thing.’ Gilbert’s comic beats are sharper and faster; and he’d doubtless have shortened it by about 15 minutes. But Burnand’s words gave the