Pappano - 'the dog ate my baton'

Jessica Duchen reveals the extraordinary excuse for the ROH orchestra's botch of yesterday's Fidelio premiere.

According to conductor Tony Pappano, the fiasco occurred because 'the first horn had hurt his lip'. (And then, with the ghastly inevitability of a gentle breeze at the world domino championships, the entire band played cr@p for 3 hours?) I checked the plausibility of this story with a violinist, who informed me that most orchestras actually play *better* when you take one of the horn players out of the equation.

Tony Pappano is a fine conductor and a very nice man - why can't he just admit they had a bit of an off day? May we suggest that when Tony is offered the inevitable peerage for his otherwise sterling efforts, he adopts the title Lord Lamest of Excuses?