You Let the Hare Win One Time....

* "You can be rude about the record industry for not reacting fast enough to downloads, but the fact is that that overwhelming change happened years before it expected."

* Ian McEwan: "...it doesn’t suit novelists to be collaborators. We are so used to playing God by ourselves."

* Orchestra director in jail for claiming tax refunds on instruments he never bought.

* Albena Danailova becomes the first female concertmaster at the Vienna State Opera.

* Apparently, the only 'sanctioned' T&A at the Classical Brits were Netrebko's.

* 12-year olds are prodigies at many things, but never the trombone!

Bram Stoker's 'Die Fledermaus'

* Franz Welser-Moest wants no part of a vampire-tinged production of Strauss' operetta.

* "Perhaps bowing should be a part of the training when studying."

* "Beethoven, As I Knew Him: A True Story" premieres this month.

* "...among the very few composers who can reliably sustain an entire concert programme, the greatest has to be Bach."

* Ward Stare named resident conductor in Saint Louis.

* How the Chinese media covered the papal concert.

* RIP, Frances Yeend.

* Warner Music's sales rose 2%, but its stock dropped 29%.

Says Who?

* "Edwardian musical comedy has not aged well."

* Helmuth Rilling doesn't know how many times he's recorded the B Minor Mass.

* Gergiev: "I don't conduct more than five to six orchestras a year, which is a very small number, I believe there are conductors who conduct 30 or 40."

* Berg invented hip-hopera, y'all.

* A children's opera performed by children.

* Nathan Gunn shills for MET in HD on the Colbert Report:

Will 'Out-Of-Print' Go Out Of Style?

* Amazon's CreateSpace offers print on demand of old titles.

* "the BBC banned "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans", because it was actually a bit beastly to the Germans."

* "The performing practices of the 20th century have actually destroyed a lot of the good things of the old style."

* The symphony as a symbol of Germany.

* MET screenings sell out down under.

* Warwick Thompson sees the influx of cinema directors as bad for opera.

Barenboim's Baton Passes To Muti

* A couple of hours ago, the Tribune reported that the CSO was holding its cards close to the vest, but the announcement just came out that they have in fact hired Ricardo Muti.

* Mozart gets his Saudi Arabian debut in a truly revolutionary concert.

* Dominic Muldowney's new piece isn't crossover.

* Nathaniel Stookey: "every composer you can think of is dead."

* Congratulations to John McDonald, Shepherd Distinguished Composer of the Year.

* Rachel Portman's The Little Prince premiered on the West Coast this weekend.

* Kirke Mechem’s opera about John Brown premiered this weekend, too.

* San Diegoans (San Diegans?) get their choice of 5 operas next year: Don Quixote, Peter Grimes, Tosca, Rigoletto, and Madame Butterfly.

"Toed the party line today..."

* Volume 2 of Prokofiev's diaries is out.

* Corigliano: "I'm always dazzled by percussion concertos, but afterwards I can't remember a single thing about them except that they were exciting and had lots and lots of notes."

* Vivaldi's Argippo gets its second production in three centuries.

* BBC's Young Musician contest turns 30.

* MSN's Music Store died a well-deserved death. Now, the EFF is pissing on the corpse.

Ogling Orff

* O₂ is hip to the fact that the only way to make Carmina Burana interesting is to throw naked girls, bungee cords, and fireworks at the thing.

* Stephen Paulus is 'one of the few composers who lives entirely from writing commissioned music'.

* Apparently, Handel had quite the pimp hand.

* Rattle is doing Stockhausen in an aircraft hangar, and Berlin is beset by bickering.

* RIP, Marios Tokas.

* China Philharmonic to play for Pope Benedict.

* Congratulations to Joel Smirnoff, the next head of CIM.

* Parking is more important than most producers realize.

* Kristjan Jarvi: "The only reason I believe that classical music concerts have become stale is that...freedom and ingenuity is lacking."

* Someone found Roger Waters' pig.

* Clear Channel dives into social networking.

Welcome To The Party, Pal!

* 3 days later, the Henry Brant obits finally start to appear outside the blogosphere.

* "People clearly see a man standing up there and it's shocking to hear a woman's voice. But I'm creating a fantasy for them..."

* Daniel Kellogg gets recognized at the zoo.

* Columbus Symphony coasts to the end of its season on fumes provided by an anonymous donor; musicians pose the biggest threat to the orchestra's future.

* Melbourne Symphony's 2008 new music schedule.

* The builders of Oslo's new opera house didn't take the needs of pianists and double bassists to heart.

* The Czech children's opera that emerged from the Holocaust.

* "All classical music happens in a bubble. The conventional view is that it needs to be protected from criticism (or any response at all, really) from anyone not entirely invested in the world of classical music. The understanding is these external views will create a pressure that will compromise, or destroy, this music."

Daleks & Humans Alike Bow Their Heads (or the nearest equivalent)

* RIP, Tristram Cary.

* What George Bush really wants to do is conduct.

* Lebrecht: "In 40 years of opera-going in London I cannot remember a moment when new work was so hot..."

* New Zealand's got a new wunderkind.

* Iran's National Orchestra turns 10.

* Brits rock against racism.

* Sony's we7 launches.

* Nokia's music bundle turns out to be a major bungle.

We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off To Have A Good Time

* How To Look Good Naked (While Playing In An Orchestra).

* South Africa's OperaMania works sex, drugs & rock 'n roll (by way of Meatloaf) into their productions, and oh yes, there was nudity.

* Sibelius plaque to be affixed to Marienstrasse 4 in Berlin today.

* Music NOW 08-09.

* ASIMO to conduct Yo-Yo Ma in Detroit.

* Grand Rapids to get an opera house. Still waiting to get their primary votes counted.

* Seoul's Chamber Music Festival turns 3.

Mathemusicality

* orchestra+

* Pavarotti x 2 = Juan Diego Florez (OR 18 high c's in "Pour mon ame").

* RIP, Bebe Barron.

* It's evaluation time for Rattle in Berlin.

* 'The Fragmented Orchestra' wins the PRS Foundation New Music Award 2008.

* The only place less musical than Salzburg these days is Vienna.

Say What?!

* Esprit Orchestra premieres new Colgrass piece for amplified harpsichord and altered piano while claiming to be 'the world’s only symphony orchestra that specializes in playing music of our time'.

* New Music Award Shortlist.

* Peter Maxwell Davies is on about Scottish independence again.

* Meet The Really Terrible Orchestra.

* ACO sez Ruby Fulton, Takuma Itoh, Andrew McKenna Lee, Leanna Primiani, Conrad Winslow, and Roger Zare are the balls.

Philip Glass on China:

* "They’re a bunch of losers".

* Valery Gergiev ranked #82 on the Telegraph's list of The 100 most powerful people in British culture, one spot behind Keira Knightley.

* "Why is NYC allowing an operatic desecration of Ground Zero?" [IOL, DW]

* Merkel pulls a Bruni @ the big opening in Oslo.

* "The idea that classical music is elitist has become an article faith in the area of art and educational policy."

* José Abreu: "Essentially this is a social system that fights poverty. A child's physical poverty is overcome by the spiritual richness that music provides."

How Not To Produce A Music Festival

* Run up £500,000 in debt.

* "At the heart of the writing process – whether you're a writer or a composer – is solitude."

* Phil Kline's Gonzo song cycle.

* Oregon signs Kalmar through 2013.

* Marc Blitztein's opera of Hellman's The Little Foxes debuts this week.

* Oslo opens its opera house, and Ho Chi Minh City refurbishes theirs (with help from Lyon).

* April 16 is World Voice Day?

Music Execs Accept Tarzan As An Apt Metaphor

* "We're still clinging to the vine of music as a product, but we're swinging toward the vine of music as a service. We need to get ready to let go and grab the next vine, which is a pool of money and a fair way to split it up, rather than controlling the quantity and destiny of sound recordings." (Maybe next month they'll figure out that whole fire thing!)

* CBC Radio 2 to broadcast So Jeong Ahn's new found sounds piece next Thursday.

* The opera house that oil built.

* Dalai Lama, Philip Glass & Richard Gere to hang out in Ann Arbor.

* Podcast of Edwin Outwater tapping a keg at an April Oktoberfest.

* What Is Music?

Shostie 5 Ain't Exactly a Lullaby...

* German Orchestra cans Israeli composition for being too loud. Composer claims bias (against new music).

* RIP, Ramiz Mustafayev.

* The EMP Pop Music Conference kicks off today. (We presented at the very first one!)

* Lalo Schifrin: "There are many motives for mixing sounds in the mind. I hear them inside, all the time, though my interior ear which is always experimenting."

* "It is important that when I am sitting in the concert hall behind a conductor that I can see the music in his body. This will help me to feel the emotions and understand what the conductor is thinking. In this way, the conductor provides a very important connection between the music and the audience." (Anyone care to call 'Bullshit'?)

* Marin Alsop isn't the only conductor who has to pretend things are peachy.

Better Late Than Never

* A batch of 18th century Italian works will receive their US Premieres on April 13.

* BBC Proms to give one day over to Stockhausen.

* Oxfam receives donation of 4,000 LP's to its thrift store.

* Andrew Lloyd Webber awarded for his classical music.

* Anne-Sophie Mutter: "There is no longer any orchestra that can accompany pianissimo as wonderfully as Karajan could."

* Philip Glass: "The world is unimaginably more violent than it was. We've accepted violence into our lives."

* The British classical music scene is so much sexier than ours.

* In global market, digital music is only 10% of the market.

As Janis Joplin Once Said,

* "On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone."

* Roman Maciejewski anyone?

* "We learned songs in high school, but not the notes. [William] Dawson let us know that being poor, black and miseducated was no excuse."

* "Making Norma dramatically convincing is tough."

* All the musicians who've toked over the years and these are the Best 5 Pot Stories you can find?

Rossini, Dvorák, Gershwin & Grofé

* The Final Four of Classical Music.

* Ear infection keeps Vladimir Jurowski from conducting in Philly.

* Brit critics conflicted over Lost Highway: Guardian, Telegraph, Times

* Opera sells tix for £10 to attract new audiences.

* A Ugandan music school turns 7.

* Downloaders take a baby step against RIAA.

Classical Music Is Getting A Bad Rep

* Telegraph: "So forget Beatles v Stones or Blur v Oasis. If you want a good old fashioned barney then welcome to the world of classical music - it's in (extremely) rude health."

* Christopher Butterfield: "I’ll never make rude comments about the woodwind quintet again!"

* Golijov wins $50k from Vilcek Foundation. Plans to blow it all in Brazil.

* Alain Trudel pens an ode to the CBC Radio Orchestra. People are protesting in the streets over its demise.

* Pittsburgh Gazette offers a snapshot of the current opera crisis. JP Morgan Chase is in buyout discussions.

* Oslo gets a new opera house.

* Hova joins Madonna and U2 in the mega-deal club at Live Nation.

* Corigliano: "A symphony seemed like an ego trip until my friends were dying of AIDS and my closest friend came down with it, and then I realized, well, this is bigger than me or anything else."

* "There's a set of data that shows that file sharing is actually good for artists. Not bad for artists."

When Has Music Ever Brought People To Fistfights?

* Golijov: "I love it when music brings people to fistfights."

* Antony Walker earns MVP status by pinch-singing during Aida while he conducted it!

* Why would anyone leave Google for EMI?

* Aussies think gyms don't pay enough for music licenses.

I Hope I Get It...

* The market's tight when 226 conductors apply for a $45,000 part-time gig.

* Bulgaria undercuts Hollywood in the film scoring sector by as much as 500%.

* Can Facebook save an orchestra?

* Dan Ettinger to take the helm at the Mannheim Opera House in 2009.

* Paavo Jarvi: "There is a sex appeal associated with larger, more glamorous American cities, but Cincinnati is real America."

* "The thing about classical music, particularly writing for orchestra, is that you have to be a control freak."

Can Slatkin Stop the Slide?

* Detroit Symphony Orchestra attendance is running at 59% of capacity this year.

* RIP, Gerhard Samuel.

* It's cheaper for CBC to do remote broadcasts of orchestras than bankroll one in its studio.

* New Jersey Symphony Orchestra to premiere a piece by one of its fiddlers.

* Vienna State Opera exhibit showcases the purge of Jewish staffers in the 1930's.

* The Tosca Trail.

* Germany makes it harder to track internet usage.

* "A huge organization like RIAA is using an anvil to nail a tack. It's starting to look like they're using the court system to generate revenue."

No One Wants To See The Fonz @ Covent Garden

* More Reaction to the Royal Opera's makeover: "Every rebranding of this sort involves, sooner or later, a DJ and the artist Julian Opie, and this one goes along with the general tendency in an almost parodic way."

"...any self-respecting "buzzy, cool" youth knows when they're being served half-baked ideas instead of the real thing. They also know crap when they see it."

* Wayne Shorter: "We just go on stage and don't know what the hell we're going to do; we just go. And then we say, let's do it again."

* The last radio orchestra on the continent will cease to be in November.

* The CEO of New Zealand Symphony Orchestra tackles an orchestral rivalry.

* Billy Corgan: "They've lost money continuously for seven or eight years and they continue to hold on to the Titanic. This is just another indication of them thinking that they can get away with whatever because they're the big old record business."

* "[David] Lynch discussed with Olga [Neuwirth] the idea that one or more of the characters in the film are undergoing a ‘psychogenic fugue’."

* "Brain-drain in music is a fact in Vietnam. Most music talents who are trained abroad don’t return home because they can’t live by music in Vietnam."

Everybody Wang Chung Tonight!

* Except for the Boston Ballet, that is.

* Emir Kusturica's operatic adaptation of "Le Temps de Gitans" is playing in Paris' Palais de Congres.

* New music makes strides in Czech Republic.

* Thom Yorke and others to remix classical tunes for some new compilation.

* 'As classical music is piped into 40 Tube stations to reduce antisocial behaviour, Jessica Duchen asks if we really want rush hour symphonies.' (Yes, it's the ONLY good thing about Penn Station!)

* Chamber Orchestra Anglia will premiere new Britten works next month.

* American Idol for classical music.

* Isn't 'The Bernstein of Early Music' a woeful oxymoron?

* "In the car, I also listen to the Saint-Saëns requiem and the Mozart requiem -- that's usually the right mood for Baghdad"

* "An endless stream of standards by Beethoven, Brahms and the Russians is a programming strategy that leads to artistic oblivion."

The Fed Has a New Industry to Bail Out

* The run of bad luck at the MET has begun, all subprime-like, to contaminate other sectors of the classical music community.

* Hao Weiya finishes Turandot for a new Chinese production.

* John Corigliano, Carter Burwell, and Lawrence Dillon to judge 2008 Realize Music Challenge.

* "With Toscanini, you got such a sharp, delineating beat, you knew exactly what he was looking for."

* Karajan dreamed of becoming the general music director for all of Europe.

* Opera Australia performs Vaughan Williams' The Pilgrim's Progress.

* April's a good month for new music down under.

Vaughan Williams KO's Rachmaninoff

* 100,000 Britons have voted The Lark Ascending the best piece of all time.

* The dustup in Sydney continues with the revelation of the interior design.

* Peking Opera still too hard to interest Chinese students.

* LA Times catches up with Paul Potts, whose YouTube clip still astounds.

* Almost half of Israel Opera's 08/09 productions are Zeffirelli's.

* Director of Padmavati is hungry for more opera.

* RIP, Datuk Wan Othman Wan Hamid Al-Khatib.

* "...when some of the really slick string quartets, like the Kronos or Turtle Island, or Alarm Will Sound play a piece, does it automatically become art music because it's done by a classically trained string quartet?"

Talk Amongst Yourselves. We'll Give You A Topic:

* The Sydney Opera House Is Neither a House Nor a Suitable Venue For Opera.

* Perhaps the end of an orchestra isn't always a bad thing.

* FT profiles Gottfried Wagner's ongoing crisis of conscience.

* Perhaps he should heed Furtwangler on the matter: "These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, for Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it is like."

* Iceland held its I Never Went South festival this weekend.

* A primer on Japanese orchestras.

* Vietnam experiences female composer boom: "Women tend to pay attention to the smallest details in life, which are usually ignored by men."

Who Knew?

* Bernard Haitink had never conducted St. Matthew Passion?

* Detroit wraps up some meaty contemporary rep in a dressing gown of 'change'.

* Albert Roussel's Padmavati opens in Paris.

* "It is as futile to go about shouting that Elgar is the English Beethoven as it would be to proclaim Mr Bernard Shaw as the English (or Irish) Goethe."

* "Anyone in whose music collection resides a solo bass record owes a debt of gratitude to Francois Rabbath."

* Royal Opera to charge fatcats $415 for admission so's it can let the groundlings in for $59.

* Dennis Russell Davies tapped to helm Basel Symphony Orchestra.

* Pauline Viardot showcase this weekend in San Fran.

* Scorsese inadvertently holds up Marley biopic.

Pop vs. Classical, Round Gajillion

* Gabriel Montero bridges the high/low divide in a welcome way.

* BSO? Not so much.

* Congratulations to former Iron Composer judge Thomas Wilkins on being appointed principal guest conductor at the Hollywood Bowl.

* Chickasaw composer gets his work recorded by San Francisco.

* Industry seems to be getting over its anti-Apple bias.

* Brendel: "you should get the information about the piece from the piece, and not inform it on the basis of what the piece should be like or what the composer should have written."

* Don't mess with Texas! Especially now that UT's music school has $55m on hand.

Just What You've Always Wanted

* Your very own Stylophone.

* The story behind Leos Janacek's Intimate Letters.

* David Arnold on film scoring: "Nothing is actually real, you don’t actually have to worry about having a responsibility to truthfulness in a real sense."

* BBC Philharmonic Orchestra takes funds away from urban renewal projects.

* Music Theatre Wales revives Birtwistle's Punch and Judy.

This Just In:

* Mozart identified.

* Robert Craft accuses Stephen Walsh of plagiarism. Stravinsky's mute on the subject.

* "would any musicians now put up with a conductor tuning an orchestra for 45 minutes or making wholesale changes to scores or learning to beat time in music he soon would lead by listening to a pianist playing it?"

* The orchestral beer ad we all loved is causing a ruckus.

* Cleveland Orchestra devotes a healthy amount of its time to new music in 08-09.

* Edinburgh slashes funding to its opera and ballet companies.

* "Classical music is enjoying mini-comeback thanks to the Internet"

* Lorin Maazel: "If there isn't some effort made to attract young males to classical music, we are going to lose, again, half the human race."

Th-th-th-that's All Folks!!

* Will the next generation of conductors be trained by Nintendo?

* Piotr Anderszewski: "It's very easy to get dragged into filling your diary, into accepting engagements because they make sense on the calendar, but I want to stop this."

* Since WWII, only 2 of Wagner's operas (Dutchman and Rheingold) have been performed in Moscow.

* The English Touring Opera is promoting Carlisle Floyd's Susannah as 'the most remarkable piece of American music theatre since Gershwin's Porgy and Bess'.

* New York City Opera veteran director Michael Haneke's new film Funny Games opens today.

* The Mess Hall win the Australian Music Prize.

It's a Dead Man's Party

* Being in Oingo Boingo seems to be the key to getting soundtrack work. Hey, once you're in with Rodney Dangerfield, you're golden...

* Golijov on Piazzolla: "He said that new music is like one of those great promises for a scientific breakthrough that could save lives."

* "You cannot trust the cultural development of a country only by what is presented in the capital."

* The Berg Orchestra takes a novel approach to audience participation.

* Barenboim's bold work on behalf of Palestine continues.

* Damon Albarn's Chinese opera to be performed at Covent Garden this July.

David Mamet Grows Up

* "...a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

* First, Leonard Cohen gets inducted into the Rock Hall. Then, he gets his poems set by Philip Glass.

* Nigel Kennedy on conductors: "All they’re interested in is strutting about, wielding a bit of power."

* AR Rahman: "There is so much talent in India, but we have no symphony orchestra"

* Enrique Batiz: "When people in the United States hear “Mexican,” they think of someone who’s looking for a job somewhere."

* Chinese don't see the need for arts education either.

Let's Get Ready To Rumble:

* Chavez v. Revueltas.

* Ethan Bortnick, the 7-year-old wunderkind de jour.

* Melbourne Symphony Orchestra markets its season around...Enescu?!

* "Karl Jenkins should be public enemy No 1 for the self-appointed classical- music elite."

* Annual Tibetan opera festival in Dharamsala.