When is the correct time for an audience to applaud?

Prevented on health grounds from attending most live concerts, I always enjoy the notices by your expert reviewers as a vicarious pleasure.

Michael Tumelty's castigation of the audience at the EIF concert by the SCO, for interrupting the Berlioz song-cycle Les nuits d'été with applause between each song, seems in my view entirely justified (August 14). The complete surprise of guest maestro Sir Roger Norrington – a conductor I greatly admire – seems slightly odd if I am correct in recalling that in earlier days he encouraged inter-movemental applause on the grounds that that's what happened in the days when the works in question were new on the scene.

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