People who let their phone ring during a concert or cinema performance should be fined, says Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Queen’s composer.

He is to write to phone companies about the practicalities of penalising “artistic terrorists” after some performances at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney were “plagued” by ringtones. A mobile went off during the pianist Alessandro Taverna’s playing of Beethoven’s Sonata in A flat major at Stromness on Saturday, and its owner was sitting near to Sir Peter:

“I’ve just had enough. It is a problem that seems to plague almost every performance everywhere these days. It just breaks the concentration of performer and the audience and breaks the spell and bond between them. While the vast majority do remember to switch them off, there are those few artistic terrorists who ruin it for everybody. There is no excuse. These people should be fined. It is an act of vandalism as far as I am concerned.” – The Times