Glyndebourne Opera's headline news this summer is its first-ever production of Britten's Billy Budd, to be directed by Donmar Warehouse director Michael Grandage in his own first venture into opera. A new Don Giovanni with Gerald Finley and a revival of the historic 1975 David Hockney Rake's Progress accompany listings of previous Festival productions of Macbeth, Cosi fan tutte and Hänsel und Gretel.

It sounded a dry subject and a dry title for Alan Bennett’s first play for five years - a fictional meeting between composer Benjamin Britten and poet W H Auden 25 years after they fell out, two old buggers, one furtive, the other extrovert. But at last night's premiere The Habit of Art proved an excruciatingly funny play, ribald, merciless, and as much about the bad habit of Theatre as that of the higher-toned Art. Nicholas Hytner has given it a wildly enjoyable production at the National Theatre that fields some epic comic performances in a bravura script.

At 84 years of age, Sir Charles Mackerras is one of the best-respected and best-loved operatic conductors working in the world today. He conducts Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera tonight and, despite bouts of ill health, found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden over their "monstrous" modern productions.

Frank Johnson, the great parliamentary sketch-writer who died in 2006, was a passionate fan of opera and ballet. While intensely admiring certain artists, he kept eye and pen sharp for his observations of cultural matters, mocking cabals of opinion-formers in the arts as ruthlessly as he quilled politicians. These extracts from a newly published collection of his writings, edited by his widow Virginia Fraser, show both sides of him.

5 March 1989: Benjamin Britten's whimsicalities

Following last week's new music CDs round-up, The Arts Desk introduces our monthly pick of the latest classical music CDs, ranging from vocal showpieces and rare opera to viola transcriptions and string quartets.