If you or I get a cold we can sit at our desks, doped on Lemsip and trundle through our day's tasks unwatched, unnoticed, silently. That is a luxury not afforded a performer who must force their voice into spectacularly unnatural contortions, expending monumental amounts of energy in the process.

So it is nearly upon us, this festival of sport like no other. I love the Olympics and spending hours watching various obscure sports and I always thought that winning a gold medal must be the greatest sporting achievement there is.

A happy fact of life at Opera Holland Park is that our largest source of income still comes from the seats we sell to our audience. For an arts organisation that has to be a healthy state of affairs; the art itself is the focus and driver of everything. But we, like others, have to find people and organisations with the resources to make the books balance.

I have made much of the need to introduce people to the world of opera and part our effort to achieve this takes the form of the Opera Challenge, now in its third year. In essence...you come on a free ticket and then pay what you believe it is worth in the form if a donation to our Inspire project. Simple. We tend to run this scheme for our rarities. See below...

It seems to me that if a person has no knowledge or experience of opera at all, we can send them off to see pretty much anything at all that we know to be beautiful, dramatic and engaging. Why might a novice not enjoy Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre Re?

A firestorm has erupted in the opera world over what has been called "censorship" by the Metropolitan Opera House of the magazine Opera News

Since my last blog several correspondents have asked what the world of opera does to introduce more people to the art form. I can't speak for other co...