CLASSICAL
Baton-wielders and the fine art of quiet authority
unch-ups backstage, audience brawls, a reviewer smeared with dog excrement – not the latest modern staging of a Verdi opera, but real-life events in actual concert halls. The most recent involves John Eliot Gardiner, the conductor who performed with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists at the King’s coronation. After a performance of Berlioz’s (The Trojans), Gardiner, reportedly annoyed with William Thomas’s stage positioning, hit the singer