I had a slightly surreal experience last night, when an actor playing the butler of a future Cabinet minister in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband announced during the interval that David Cameron had just departed Buckingham Place en route to 10 Downing Street to form the next UK government. It was just one of a few pleasing convergences of art and life of the evening, not least of which was that we were gathered in something called the Churchill Room at the time.

The play, which has several political references that could have been written just before curtain-up, was performed by a group of Oxford students led by actor/ director Krishna Omkar, in a gala performance at Dartmouth House in Mayfair. The historic building, just a stone’s throw from the play’s original setting, is now home to the English-Speaking Union, a charity launched at the end of the First World War with the aim of promoting closer ties between the world’s English-speaking peoples. It has a busy schedule of arts-related events, as well as political debates.

The gala performance was to celebrate 125 years of drama at Oxford, where Wilde himself studied, and which is also the alma mater of a huge number of writers, actors and directors, including Richard Burton, Partick Marber, Hugh Grant, Kate Beckinsale, Thea Sharrock and Rosamund Pike.

Many of us younger opera-goers have never had a chance until now to see Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers in action. Opinions have been divided on its status as one of the great operas of the last half-century, but it certainly brought out the composers: the night I went, both Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage were in the audience, and at Saturday's final performance the 83-year-old composer was there for what must surely be the most perfectly co-ordinated, visually beautiful production he could ever hope to see.

The recorder is indelibly associated with school and dreaded first music classes, but the association will be on a considerably higher plane on 21 June when the world recorder star Michala Petri combines with the Royal Ballet School for a one-off show on Midsummer’s night.

Performing on the organ is, if you will, a lofty pursuit. Its repertoire calls for devotional focus. And then there’s this bloke.

...So who says classical music is dead, apart from that critic on the grisly Late Review a couple of years ago (re Birtwistle's The Minotaur - to be precise, "If you think classical music is dead, go to Covent Garden and see the corpse")? Of course, it would be even better if the Proms's wow factor could spread to the rest of the season. But let's not complain.

Many have, though, about the new online system, which allowed newcomers to book on a blank-cheque basis; and last night I met an outraged old-timer who'd failed on Day One to get a seat for the first night performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony. And before you say he can always queue to stand in the arena, he's in a wheelchair.

Everyone else who's desperate to be there and doesn't have a seat is going to have to take along the thermos and sandwiches and join the queue for those super-cheap sold-on-the-day Prommer places. Because already the number of Proms with sold-out notices slapped over them is considerable, and growing by the day.

• Further details of the Proms on the BBC website

This week, after a performance of Enron at the Noel Coward Theatre, I chaired a Q&A session with director Rupert Goold, writer Lucy Prebble, actor Sam West and most of the rest of the cast. What no one in the room knew then, though Goold and Prebble would have, was that at 11pm EST the show’s Broadway closure would be announced for this Sunday, only two weeks after it opened on 27 April. Enron was famously a rare beneficiary of the credit crunch. Now, at least in America, it would appear to have become a victim of it. Why?

Last year critics were pleasantly surprised that the Turner Prize shortlist included works that could actually be admired for traditional notions of beauty. This year they might be surprised at its sheer variety. The four nominees not only include a painter, but an artist who crushes, bends and rips her canvases, a sound artist who sings and places her recorded voice in unusual and tucked-away places, and a duo who make futuristic films in which humans have evolved in “microgravity”.