Hot on the heels from its two triumphant concerts at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, the Australian World Orchestra headed south for its Melbourne appearance. Alas – and no jokes about Melbourne weather, please; it’s still too sensitive a subject – somewhere betwixt Harbourside and Southbank, the dreaded lurgy struck conductor Simon Rattle and soloist, mezzo-soprano, Magdalena Kožená. For Rattle, the show went on. For Kožená, alas, it didn’t.

As to how you explain this to a capacity Saturday-night audience could have been left to the trembling offstage voice of an AWO factotum. Instead, at just after 8 pm, the house lights dimmed and out strode Simon Rattle, no less, to deliver the bad news. Imagine, for a moment, one of his predecessors at the Berlin Philharmonic doing such a thing: Herbert von Karajan apologising for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s laryngitis? But, then, Karajan and Schwarzkopf (a) were superhuman Teutons for whom sickness represented an admission of human failing, and (b) were not married to each other.