Touring an orchestra is a fraught occupation at best. “You can’t say you know the full terror of being in the music business,” a London orchestral manager told me, “until you have glanced out of the window of the plane and seen your timpani still standing on the tarmac.”

The schedules are frequently insane - it is common to play in ten countries on ten successive days. The logistical nightmare of conveying vast arrays of percussion and bulky double basses can easily be imagined. So can the worries of shunting dozens of stringed instruments – worth millions – round hotels and airports.

Matters are complicated by today’s stringent security. Musicians and airlines are at war over which instruments can be carried as hand luggage, and which have to be consigned to the tender mercies of baggage handlers and the sub-zero temperatures of an aircraft hold.

Then there are the problems of conveying 80 volatile artistic types round the world. Orchestral folklore has many a tale involving brass players, alcohol, the propensity of all foreign hotels to look alike at 4am and the local police.

The miracle is that, as with the London Symphony Orchestra’s latest mishap, the show so often goes on. Indeed, orchestras seem to do best in adverse circumstances. The most impassioned playing I heard from the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan was when the Germans were infuriated at having to play in “civvies” at the Festival Hall when their concert gear was held up by an industrial dispute at Heathrow.

The LSO should be used to the pitfalls of touring. For its first US tour it was booked, until a last-minute change of plan, to sail on a smart new liner called Titanic.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
• Revolution at the new Saatchi Gallery
• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse