Emphasising process rather than the end-product, it’s an experiment in collaboration – something composers and librettists are assumed to know about instinctively, with the result that the 400-year history of their relationship is written in blood. One is Opera Lab, which takes place on a farm near Sevenoaks, and is a cross between an adult playgroup and a residential courtship bureau. Run by the composer Robert Saxton with a team which, this year, included the stage director Annabel Arden, soprano Jane Manning and poet Ruth Fainlight, it gathers together would-be opera composers and would-be librettists who pair off and develop ideas that, in the course of a week, grow into performable fragments. But if you’re dedicated to the task you don’t allow yourself to be deflected, and in the past fortnight I’ve been to two annual talent- nurturing projects whose dedication is unwavering.

And he was generous in his encouragement of younger talent, championing the likes of Angela Gheorghiu whose breakthrough came with the Covent Garden Traviata that he conducted in 1992.
It isn’t always easy to encourage talent Sometimes it resists Occasionally it rebels. Whether he was so great is matter for argument: the hectoring, staccato fierceness of his beat could be as irritating as it was exciting. But he will certainly be remembered for readings of magisterial strength that survive on disc as well as in collective memory. His Decca Ring cycle was a landmark in recording history; his 22 years with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra one of the most productive artistic marriages of modern times. And it was noticeable that of late the “screaming skull” (as he was known in the business) had softened. His musical mentality seemed less severe, his feeling for legato lines more obvious. Like most of Britain, this week’s Proms were steeped in death On Wednesday there was Brahms’s Requiem, on Friday Verdi’s.

And the Verdi was particularly poignant, not just because we now know it was Princess Diana’s favourite music but because this performance was supposed to have been conducted by Georg Solti, whose own death trailed behind the others in terms of newsworthiness but was a shattering event for those who considered him the greatest conductor alive. Because look at what white middle-class feminism stands for – anorexia and bulimia.” Dunye has constructed a chatty, sexy, good-humoured and moving meditation on race, sexuality, history and gender Slight, but a delight.Cinema details: Going Out, page 14.. Its character sketches are keenly observed, and its cultural pseudo-investigations are lent academic verisimilitude by Camille Paglia: “If the watermelon symbolises African-American culture, rightly so. An irresistible period piece with a savage sense of humour and a five-second cameo from Doris Speed (Annie Walker to you).The Watermelon Woman (nc) is a witty mixture of social comedy, pseudo- documentary and self-portrait. It’s a sort of African-American lesbian version of Zelig: Cheryl Dunye directs and stars as a frustrated film- maker researching the life of Fay Richards, a forgotten (and fictional) black film actress of the 1930s – known as the Watermelon Woman.

All the men are low-lifes or hard-cases, all the women are slatterns (apart from a mute girl with a predilection for nocturnal Hoovering) and Baker’s detective has an arrestingly casual line in chauvinism. His dialogue, too, is self-consciously American, drunk on its freedom to slip words like “bitch” and “bastard” into its staccato rhythms. Guest (who later directed The Quatermass Xperiment) makes Manchester look like Manhattan, filling his images with as much neon and highrise architecture as he can find. Val Guest’s Hell is a City (15) opens the Barbican festivities, and stars Stanley Baker in a script with a marvellously dated sense of sleaze.