In Brief: Christmas Eve Edition

Here is your regular Sunday dosage of interesting items, from Blogville and beyond:

• American composer Daniel Pinkham passed away on the morning of December 18, in Natick, Massachusetts. Prolific and seemingly unstoppable, Pinkham premiered his most recent opera, The Cask of Amontillado, around the time of his 80th birthday, in 2003. Carson Cooman wrote an obituary. [Sequenza 21]
  
• Alex Ross marks the death of Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, on December 22. [The Rest Is Noise]
  
• Who sits down to hear a contemporary music concert? Virgil Thomson catalogues the audience of 1950, with comparative notes by Greg Sandow a half-century later. [Sandow]
  
• Lisa Hirsch recaps the critical savagery that greeted the opening of Tan Dun's Last Emperor at the Met. [Iron Tongue of Midnight]
  
• At first I thought that Ned Vizzini's guestblogging stint for Jessa Crispin was some sort of joke, a literary experiment masquerading as blogging. The posts became odder and odder but appear to be real. I kept reading. [Blog of a Bookslut]
  
• George Loomis, I want your job when you retire. Yes, the roving critic is in St. Petersburg, checking out the new hall that Valery Gergiev built for the Mariinsky Theater. [IHT]
  
• In our search for the perfect Christmas Concert, we dreamed of Les Arts Florissants performing Bach's Christmas Oratorio. William Christie's young soloists are singers to watch: Nicholas Watts, Tim Mead, Marcel Beekman, Marie Arnet, Markus Werba. [The Independent]
  
• Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic was on the block. It is one of the great American paintings, so the National Gallery of Art quite reasonably made a bid. Wealthy Philadelphians prefer to keep the work in Philadelphia. Well, if Sam Walton's money was in the mix, we can be glad he got stiffed. [WP]
  
• The forward-thinking chamber ensemble eighth blackbird has a blog: we thank them for linking to Ionarts. [thirteen ways]