In Brief: Back to School

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond. There is not much activity out there, it being summer and all, but a few people are still posting.

• La Cieca tells us that Rufus Wainwright's opera, Prima Donna, will actually not, to my great surprise, receive its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Why? Because the libretto is in French, which is somehow a problem for the "American opera" slot of Peter Gelb's American house. [Parterre Box]


• Meanwhile, Nico Muhly, whose opera is still slated to be premiered at the Met (well, at Lincoln Center), has hit the press jackpot in the coverage of his new album, Mothertongue. Even I reviewed his music for the Post last spring. If he gets this kind of attention in the mainstream press, Nico Muhly must be the promised savior of supposedly dying classical music, right? [Washington Post]


• From Bart Collins, whose blog is a new read around here, a nice article in the Boston Globe on Laury Gutiérrez and her HIP ensemble, La Donna Musicale, who are dedicated to the rediscovery of women composers in the Baroque period. [The Well-Tempered Blog]


• Put me down as a fan of the film composer Bernard Herrmann, whose opera Wuthering Heights is one of the great, underappreciated American stage works. (Hopefully, someone at Washington National Opera is reading?) Another new blog read for me, Elaine Fine, adds a layer to my appreciation of Herrmann by pointing out that the composer used a viola d'amore in his score for the 1951 Ida Lupino film On Dangerous Ground. The player, Virginia Majewski, got solo billing in the credits. [Musical Assumptions]


• Ilan Volkov will be in Washington this winter, conducting a very interesting program with the National Symphony in January, as well as making his Washington National Opera debut in their production of Peter Grimes. Andrew Clements says that when Volkov steps down as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra next month, British music will lose "by far the most enterprising [programs] of any of the BBC orchestras." [The Guardian]


• Although she was in Salzburg, a certain Denmark-based blogger has some reports about Daniel Barenboim's collapse at the podium during a Copenhagen concert by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Scary stuff. [Mostly Opera]