I think I’ve possibly only previously seen the Orchestra of the Royal Ballet and Opera take an on-stage curtain call at the end of a Ring cycle. But here they are at the end of Giselle, celebrating the 80th anniversary of their first performance back in the house after WW2 🥰

I’m not personally at Mahagonny tonight, but it’s bloody lovely to see this sign outside ENO.

I’ve just looked through the Metropolitan Opera’s new season announcement and… well it’s not very interesting, is it?

I do think it’s funny that the USA broke from England to get rid of the monarchy so that no one would be above the law and yet only one of these countries has arrested a senior political figure in relation to Epstein and it wasn’t the USA

Lots of fireworks around in the last few days (including some INSANELY loud ones around the Elephant & Castle area on Saturday). The only thing I can think of is Chinese New Year but Saturday might have been a bit early for that. Have I overlooked some other cultural event?

After an unduly stressful day, which caused me to lose concentration repeatedly during Mahagonny at ENO, my evening was crowned by returning home to my smoke alarm emitting a low-battery alert 😵‍💫 - I had a spare but it was as old and dead as the active one. Local Costcutter fortunately had one.

love that the argument here is it will stop ppl 'drifting to the greens' the implication that ppl are natural labour voters and just a nice little policy here or there and we'll all come flooding back labour abandoned me. then i found the greens. im happy with the greens. they're not a 2nd choice.

WOMEN👏DON’T👏WANT👏CHOCOLATES 👏FOR 👏VALENTINE’S 👏DAY 👏THEY 👏WANT 👏MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S 👏COLLEGIATE 👏DICTIONARY 👏TWELFTH 👏EDITION 👏

Before Giselle, I went to the matinee of Operation Mincemeat. I have now seen this show a small handful of times, and astonishingly, have seen Madeleine Jackson-Smith playing Jean Leslie (and others), Ewen Montagu (and others) and as of today, Johnny Bevan (and others). HOW does she remember it all?

The opening night cast of Giselle at the Royal Ballet - led by Marianela Núñez, William Bracewell and Claire Calvert - acknowledging choreographer Sir Peter Wright, in the year of his (🙏🤞) 100th birthday.

Nice early-bird meal deal from Artusi in Peckham, though I don’t THINK they meant to say that one of the drink options is “beef”…

Public service announcement: ENO’s Mahagonny next week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) is sold out, which means they’ve released standing tickets. £15 (all fees included), unreserved, at the rear of the Dress and Upper Circles (no surtitle view).

I’m not generally in the habit of pining for things I can’t have, but my local Malaysian restaurant, Janda Diner in Peckham, is closed for a few weeks for a facelift, and every SINGLE night I’ve been free since it closed, I have craved a meal there 😕

Advert on the radio for the Post Office ISA: “You only have until 5th April to make the most of your £20,000 allowance. What are you waiting for?” Er… for a magical benefactor to provide me with the 5-figure sum that is the difference between what I already have in my ISA and £20,000? 🤣

More cynically, I feel it's this generation's Thalidomide, invented to fix an issue that, in the grand scheme of things, isn't really an issue and there's plenty of other meds available to do the same and better, and yet the mass adoption is leading to catastrophic injuries for the next generation.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Me, at @stolavehartst.bsky.social Choral Evensong tonight, getting my debut shot at the plum Soprano 2 line in the Dresden Amens in Stanford in B flat 😎

always so funny to me when people are like “how am I supposed to explain Gay to my kids?” my kid asks me way harder shit all the time. “why did they build the road this way? why are some people bad?” I don’t know. please ask me about Gay

Booked a ticket for the Grange Festival’s Eugene Onegin, and once again I find myself wondering how the Grange Festival manages to keep its ticket prices so much more reasonable than the other summer opera festivals on a comparable scale 🤔

Fundraising email just received from Scottish Opera reveals a new production of Turandot due to be performed in Oct/Nov 2026, directed by David McVicar. Wouldn’t normally travel for a Turandot, but McVicar does his best work at Scottish Opera. I’ll make my mind up when they announce the cast.

The Barbican has added a next-day encore screening of the upcoming Met broadcast of Tristan und Isolde to its schedule. Given that the live broadcast on 21 March clashes with one of the dates of the Royal Opera’s Siegfried, this may be pretty useful for Wagnerians of Central London.

It was brought to my attention recently that there is a 4-week period coming up - beginning with the last week of February - when there is almost no opera being performed in London. I know the ENO season ends tragically early nowadays, but it’s not usual to have a big gap at the Royal Opera… is it?

I just listened to the West Green Opera Gala edition of Friday Night is Music Night, on BBC Radio 3 - finally broadcast after the original intention to air it in October - and the random thought just popped into my head that I still need to iron the dress I wore to it before I can wear it again 🤣

Taking a substantial detour on my way home from town, in miserable weather and heavy bus traffic, because I need one remaining ingredient for a recipe and can only think of one place that will definitely sell it.

no it isn't. im dirt poor and i don't use ai. stop pushing your rationalisation for being shit at art or whatever on to the rest of society. don't use ai.

Honestly this is the final piece of evidence you need that the media commentariat are rotten to their core, always has been, and that maybe this is a profession or sphere of influence that humanity can do without.

This morning: picked three things to remove from my diary in order to free up time and money. This afternoon: oooh, what an interesting concert! *books* Admittedly it was both at a much more convenient time and a lot cheaper than any of the three events whose tickets I opted to return.

On my way to Covent Garden to see Boris Godunov - my only evening in a theatre this week, following a January in which it felt as though I was out every night.

First glimpse of the rep for English Touring Opera’s Autumn 2026 season, courtesy of the website of their new home, the Sheffield Lyceum: Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridyce (sung in English, I assume, per their current policy) and a double bill of Elena Langer’s Ariadne with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

Eight weeks after the gig, the last of my Christmas-freelancing debtors has finally paid their musicians 😬👌

Hmmm. Wonder how little money I can get away with spending this week on general expenses. Fridge is well-stocked, I only have 2 evenings out (one is work, the other is already paid for) and it *should* therefore be possible to survive on absolute minimum and divert the remainder into “fun money”…

Managed to get myself a nice ticket the other day for a repeat visit to the Royal Opera’s Turandot, this time with Arsen Soghomonyan as Calaf (though I’m mainly going because I want to hear the ladies again). Trying to think what I’ve see him in before, other than Opera Rara’s Le villi 🤔

I'm in antifa high command and we run all our clandestine meetings in Melania viewings

friend of mine is an undocumented immigrant and has been hiding in Melania theaters bc he knows people assume no one is in there

I’m feeling very stuck today. Mildly under the weather physically, and incapable of facing the world mentally. I dare say it’ll pass.

I'm sorry, but the reaction to Brianna Ghey being murdered by people she knew offline *because she was transgender* becoming 'we should stop teenagers from being on social media' rather than 'we should deal with the recent horrifying rise of transphobia in the UK' is unbelievably fucking bullshit.

Christ, this is fucking dystopian. How about free art classes, language courses, music lessons, sport sessions, further education modules or anything other than this. This is the antithesis of education it’s a campaign of national brain rot.

Update: it’s lasted less than 24 hours 🤣 - not that I’ve actually BOUGHT the extra thing yet, but the clip I’ve just watched of Ruzan Mantashyan singing the letter scene in the Paris Onegin has just made me add the Grange Festival production to my must-see-this-summer list…

Sitting here trying to work, when there is nowhere I’d rather be right now than at the Royal Opera House about to watch La traviata (yes, again) but it’s a Schools Matinee and no amount of love, yearning, insider knowledge or subterfuge was ever going to get me into this one 😭 Lucky schoolchildren…

Trawling the interwebs today (because I get itchy when nobody’s making season announcements…) I discover that New Sussex Opera’s autumn 2026 show will be Charpentier’s David & Jonathan. www.newsussexopera.org

I am determined that, with the exception of a handful of known things I’ve already made allowance for, I’m not buying tickets for anything else between now and the summer. I’m sick of my diary getting overcrowded when the only person I can blame for it is myself. Wonder how long that’ll last…

I see that Blackheath Halls Opera has announced (via info on the page for their fundraising opera gala) that their 2026 production is Carmen. Not that it’s a bad choice for their resources, but it feels like they did it relatively recently (and I don’t think they’ve ever repeated rep before) 🤔

If you want to know how profitable working in the arts is, I'm 45, currently have 5 different regular jobs and have not hit the threshold for plan 1 student loan repayments. Just in case you were wondering why I am so against AI stealing from creatives...

Also, all you 2A defenders are being AWFULLY quiet about how this good guy with a gun was executed by the state for *checks notes* being a good guy legally carrying a legally purchased gun

Gestapo morale is plummeting. Ah bless.

Looks like I shop at Aldi now. My local (ish) branch has recently reappeared after three years of site redevelopment. Much less convenient to get to than Lidl, but they seem to stock a version of all* my most-valued products which Lidl annoyingly seem to have recently discontinued.

"I feel like I've come home," Suella Braverman tells assembled Reform UK voters. Funny thing - the word on the tip of their tongue, looking at her, is also 'repatriation'.

Laughed out loud at the 'breaking news' that Suella Braverman has defected to Reform. What was that about it not being a home for rejected/failed Tory MPs?

I think at this point the UK has accepted Paddington as the Death Bear, collector of souls. So, I think as a nation we should start smearing marmalade on the eyes of the dead and whisper “fare for the crossing”. It’ll feel weird now but, in three of four generations, no one will question it.

Eeek. Got a lottery cheapie for Operation Mincemeat tonight (my, er, very not-first visit) and found myself saying “It’s OK I know where I’m going” to the usher in the same authoritative tone that I usually only use at the Royal Opera House and Coliseum… 🤣