Benjamin Schmid, one of the artists mentioned in an “In tune” article titled Hong Kong Arts Festival.

I once spent a year in Rochester, N.Y., where seven months are committed to snow. Understandably, city leaders paid someone somewhere for a marketing slogan to get people to visit. The winner: “I’d rather be in Rochester – It’s got it.”

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Ever wonder what kind of penmanship George Frederick Handel had? Was he the type to cross things out with a single, swift stroke, or did he cover up his mistakes in a scratchy flurry? Well, wonder no more.

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Ten years ago, there was chaos and inertia. Now Britain’s opera houses are world class – and its conductors have revolutionised their orchestras.
 
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The classical-music world has a fraught relationship with fame. On the one hand, people are always pining for the days when Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, and Leontyne Price dominated the airwaves and appeared on the covers of magazines.
 
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Just over an hour into a rehearsal here last week, the maestro’s baton came down like the crack of a whip, and the music screeched to a halt. Long Yu, the imperious 45-year-old conductor of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, wanted perfection.
 
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On Wednesday night, 30-year-old Latvian Andris Nelsons, music director of England’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, makes his debut at the Metropolitan Opera leading Puccini’s “Turandot.”
 
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Have you ever wondered what it’s like to conduct a word-class professional orchestra?

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For the first time an orchestra in mainland China is taking on a foreign music director: the French conductor Michel Plasson is becoming music director of the China National Symphony Orchestra.
 
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Neville Marriner puts down his cup and saucer and waves an invisible baton around the living room of his Kensington, London, home.
 
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