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It was 170 years between performances of Rossini’s opera Ermione. Anne Midgette is aware that such long lost finds more often than not prove why they were forgotten. But “for my money, this is the best rediscovery to cross the radar in a long time. Anyone who likes 19th-century Italian opera — from Donizetti to Verdi — should see City Opera’s “Ermione.”

All of a sudden there are all these opportunities to buy cheap tickets to opera and music in London. So here’s the challenge – how much can you get in to £50? Try five shows at some of the city’s biggest performing arts venues.

London’s Royal Opera House’s plans to offer some of its best seats for £10 is not going to widen the audience for opera, says a leading think tank. The critique suggests that “such schemes are more likely to encourage the middle class to go to the opera more often, rather than widen access.”

For the fourth year in a row Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 has topped Classic FM’s most-loved music poll. “Its emergence – in each year so far of the new century – as the British classical listening public’s favourite tune indicates Rachmaninov’s position as perhaps the most popular mainstream composer of the last 70 years. Its place was secured by the votes of the commercial station’s listeners.”

Larry Nager was recently fired as the Cincinnati Enquirer’s pop music critic. Nager says it was because he just turned 50. “The Enquirer, Nager claims, deemed him expendable because he didn’t fit the paper’s profile of someone who should be reporting on the Britneys and Justins of the music world. Nager accuses the Enquirer — and many other newspapers — of targeting an 18-34 female demographic, a move he calls a reaction to the whole MTV-ing of our society … newspapers are trying belatedly to be ‘with it.'”