In Brief: Palm Sunday Edition

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

• I couldn't bring myself to review Paul Potts when he sang at Lisner Auditorium (the Post skipped it, too), but Matthew Guerrieri took the bullet in Boston and puts it quite nicely. [Boston Globe]


• Leon Fleisher will celebrate his 80th birthday at Shriver Hall, playing four-hands piano with Katherine Jacobson, Yefim Bronfman, and Johnathan Biss (on October 5). The rest of Shriver Hall's next season includes tantalizing concerts by Radu Lupu, Ewa Podles, Ingrid Fliter, Emmanuel Pahud with Trevor Pinnock, and Ian Bostridge in an all-Schubert program. [Critical Mass]


• The award for Best Line about the Eliot Spitzer scandal goes to the illustrious Sommer Mathis: "Interestingly, it appears as though Spitzer actually arranged for his hooker to travel from New York to D.C. for their rendezvous. What's up with that, Governor? Our D.C. prostitutes aren't good enough for you?" [DCist]


• Most Topical Award relating to the above goes to Alex Ross, who hopes that the "Classical Music CD" reportedly requested by the governor for listening during his assignation was Tristan und Isolde. Since we are talking about high-class prostitutes, I would have guessed Thaïs (or La Traviata or Madama Butterfly). If we were talking about whores, it could have been The Beggar's Opera or The Rake's Progress. For sheer erotic abandon, the Dance of the Seven Veils from Salome? Daniel Felsenfeld hopes for Berg's Lyric Suite or Lulu, and Soho the Dog quips Turn of the Screw. For Mrs. Spitzer's sake, we hope the governor is now listening to Le Nozze di Figaro, to find out how another philanderer who got burned by an assignation gone awry begs his wife for forgiveness. [The Rest Is Noise]


• Anna Netrebko says the darnedest things! From her recent interview in Playboy (sorry, guys -- no special pictures): "I definitely understand what I'm singing, so that makes it easier to remember, except in French; in French, I am like a monkey, just repeating back the sounds of the words." [The Opera Tattler]


• Are the rumors of the death of classical music exaggerated? Check out the crowd of Montanans listening to the Helena Symphony under a Big Sky. [The Rest Is Noise]


• The following made it into Overheard in D.C., the weekly review of eavesdropping around Washington:

  At least, that's what the review in High-Falutin' Magazine said
  
  GW campus, waiting in an ATM line:
  
  Young guy in a suit on a cell phone: "He is incredibly skilled. I mean, he is the shit of concert pianists."

  Take that, death of classical music! The only question that remains is: who he was talking about? Given the week, it could be Lang Lang, Yundi Li, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Alfred Brendel... [DCist]


• Tim Page, on sabbatical from the Washington Post, is reportedly happy in sunny California. [Opera Chic]