In Brief

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• The town of Saint-Etienne, the birthplace of Jules Massenet, hosts a festival honoring the composer every other year. They are mounting a production of Ariane (1906) this year, and Francis Carlin has a review. If they stage Esclarmonde, I will be obliged to go. [Financial Times]


• Martha Argerich speaks to journalist David Mermelstein. No one is injured. Damn you, Verbier Festival Orchestra! Why could you not make a stop in Washington? [Bloomberg News]


• A nutty kind of "Opera Digest" program takes favorite operas and abridges them to about 90 minutes, for the younger, busier, non-opera-going types. Wait just a holy second -- this is happening in Italy? [International Herald Tribune]


• For her 500th post Anne-Carolyn Bird writes about the experience of singing Barbarina at the Met. Chapeau, ACB! [The Concert]


• You may remember my post about the fire at Weimar's Duchess Anna Amalia Library in 2004, in which volunteers and library faithful not only helped to fight the fire but formed a human chain to save as many books as they could. The repairs and reconstruction are finished, but the losses to the collection were worse than first reported. [International Herald Tribune]


• Our favorite Finnish blogger took her granddaughter to the symphony. It sounds like they had a great time in this sweet post. Cute kid! [Marja-Leena Rathje]


• One reason it is fun to live in the District of Columbia: you can visit all the monuments on the back of U.S. currency, line them up with the bill folded in half, and take a picture. [DCist]