Where do you learn the sort of self-control that allows you to sit as expressionless as

Where do you learn the sort of self-control that allows you to sit as expressionless as a line-judge, just after you've bunny-hopped the white ball over a sitting-duck colour? At the amateur level, the instinctive response to such a moment is very different: first you utter one of those contained, pressure-cooker screams - the sort that you give when you've just got the baby to sleep and step back on to a piece of Lego; then you beat your forehead sharply on the table edge and then you return to your chair muttering obscenities under your breath. Not for Nigel Bond: if points were awarded for the unflickering endurance of pain he would have scooped the Championship easily. But the really gripping bit is the cutaway to the non-player - obliged to sit there without a twitch as his opponent wipes the table clean. I don't mean all that stuff with the balls, though admittedly that's compelling enough - a beautiful Newtonian dance of vectors and transferred momentum. With his long-standing recital partner David Willison, dressed in period evening wear but not hamming it up, he began in calm and built over the entire span towards a single climax of direct, intense anguish. The warmth of the Cornish-inflected voice, the ease of delivery, had an unaffected tone that held his audience captivated.Robert Maycock. Once again the Snooker World Championships delivered the spectacle of human muscle tutored into a mechanical perfection. As a feat of heroic restraint, it almost matches Enoch's own.It could have been made for Benjamin Luxon, whose progress from singer to actor has been unfolding at Broomhill, where he last year played Bottom - Shakespeare's, not Britten's.

The visionary endings of each "act" are strikingly characterised; strong, easily grasped themes recur. But there is no symphonic continuity, and Strauss left long silences for the tale to move forward without distraction. He stiffens his upper lip and vows to let them live on as he fades away broken-hearted, revealing the truth only on his deathbed It could be maudlin; it could be moving. All depends on the delivery, and Strauss pre-empted many of the speaker's choices.Master of the lavish and loud though he might be, he gave it a score of steady tempo, sparse textures and subtly inflected feeling.

Enoch, happily married to Annie, seeks his fortune at sea and disappears for 10 years, presumed lost. Annie, her misgivings at length overcome, marries his old friend and rival Philip and achieves a kind of healed contentment with her second family; but Enoch escapes from the island where he has been shipwrecked and finds his way home. Now, if this had been Italian opera, an orgy of jealousy and vengeance would have ensued But Enoch knows an Englishman's duty. That gave all the more appeal to Sunday night's performance at Broomhill, an acoustically superb theatre of the right period, recently put back on the map by some high-powered opera productions The narrative is itself pretty operatic. By the end, you'd have given anything for a quiet shot of Vera Lynn.Robert Hanks. Few composers have been as astute at reading the market.