Palestrina has held a place in the German repertoire since its Munich premiere 80 years ago

Palestrina has held a place in the German repertoire since its Munich premiere 80 years ago, but, though it has earned a kind of cult following elsewhere, it has not travelled well. When Hans Pfitzner’s “musical legend” Palestrina receives its first professional staging in Britain next week at the Royal Opera House, it will mark the final arrival here of one of this century’s least heard yet most talked about musical masterpieces. Show us your underpants.”Billy Connolly continues at the Labatts Apollo, Hammersmith, London W6 (0990 405040) to 8 FebJames Rampton. But age has not withered his blistering energy on stage.If anything, it has intensified it “I’m becoming so juvenile,” he confessed “Every year, I get more and more regressive. Where would he practise? He’d have a thousand children behind him going like that [doing an exaggeratedly poncey walk].” Connolly made jokes about his advancing years – he has long seen the back of 50 – “the ravenous lust for sex turns into an overwhelming desire for sleep”. I lapsed into a laughter-induced coughing fit as he re-enacted the Olympic 50km walk: “Who watches them and says, ‘I want to do that’? You’ll never have a champion from Glasgow. A surreal gag imagining John Major demanding sexual favours in the manner Bill Clinton is alleged to have done – “he’d have to take his shirt out of his underpants” – immediately prompted a routine about underwear hanging out to dry: “I’m addicted to washing-lines.” Anyone tracing the show’s course with a pencil would soon end up with an illegible blur of lines.Though some of his ranting got tiresome – the Daily Telegraph critic would not have enjoyed the torrent of abuse directed at him – Connolly can still very much cut it live.

He makes a virtue out of going off on tangents from his tangents; he returned five separate times over 45 minutes to try to complete his account of the weekend’s fracas with the photographer. Without telling conventional gags, he spends two and a half hours, in his words, “rambling”. Also, his television series Billy Connolly’s World Tour of Australia received some decidedly sniffy reviews late last year for its perceived self-indulgence.
There could be no such quibbles about his live performances, however; in his newly re-grown beard, he looked and acted like some medieval potentate returning after a crusading jaunt to an adoring public to reclaim his rightful kingdom.He has certainly been away from the British live arena for some years – and admitted to early nerves – but as he announced soon after coming on: “As long as priests are still shagging children, there’ll always be material.”Connolly sticks to tried and tested methods. Connolly has been on the wrong end of some flak lately; his most recent encounter of a violent kind with a journalist last weekend resulted in a photographer being propelled out of a Glasgow bar as fast as a baddie from a saloon in a Clint Eastwood movie. There was no mistaking it; you could only be here for Billy Connolly. Just in case a punter had inadvertently entered the Labatts Apollo on Monday still expecting to see the recently departed Riverdance, the stage backdrop was plastered with the sort of slogans not readily associated with the wholesome Irish dance troupe: “grey pubic hair”, “sheep-shagging”, “incontinence pants”, and “itchy bum”.

Rae is perhaps a more original painter than Hume, but on the evidence here she is also a less satisfying one.Saatchi Gallery, London NW8 (0171-624 8299) To 6 April Richard Ingleby. it’s a process with no possibility of arrival.” As a painter this may be an admirable quest, but for a viewer the quest alone is not enough. “The appeal of painting,” she has said, “is that there is no solution It always eludes you… She makes pictures that are easy to look at but impossible to focus on – there is nowhere for the eye to rest. This process gives the work an undeniable energy, but the argument, it seems, is never settled.The exhibition catalogue describes Rae’s work as the visual equivalent of station hopping on the radio, snatches of this and that, but never still and never silent – a comment meant to intrigue but which also exposes her weakness. Her big abstract paintings are frenzied compilations of colour and shape, the product, as she describes it, of “having an argument in the painting”. It is an elegant reduction, very fin de siecle, absolutely of its own time.Fiona Rae’s work is similarly stamped with the spirit of the Nineties, but next to Hume her world seems altogether more chaotic.

One of the best, Begging For It, depicts a praying or pleading figure silhouetted in blue with black-gloved arms against a lime green ground. Hume’s odd blend of minimalism and cluttered kitsch is most effective when he keeps it simple, distilling the image into basic shapes and patterns. Labour proposes that an authorisation to burgle and bug already given by a chief constable shall not take effect without the approval of a commissioner appointed by the Prime Minister. It is time to step up exchanges along that new frontier, which is why the Tory response to the IPPR commission will dismay perceptive business people as they look forward to political change with equanimity, if not outright enthusiasm.. When both parties are pro- business, it will be the quality of their policies that matters – welfare into work, schooling, skill training, regional economic advance, research, all those areas of “deep investment” for which the state alone possesses the resources and time horizon. A Blair government will have to master the trick of recognising the justice of employees’ claims while continuing to distance itself from Labour’s historical partnership with the trade unions.