In Brief

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

• After stepping down from the New York Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel will start an annual festival on his property in Rappahannock County, Castleton Farms. The Châteauville Foundation will host the first Castleton Festival on July 4-19, 2009. It will include all of the Britten operas that Maazel has staged there (and that we have reviewed): The Rape of Lucretia, the adaptation of The Beggar's Opera, and The Turn of the Screw. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]


• "I, for one, welcome our tall, slender Austrian overlord!" Zach Lewis's tenure as critic of the Cleveland Orchestra begins with a puff piece. [Cleveland Plain Dealer]


• Mark Swed proposes the perfect solution to the Plain Dealer's problem: let both Zach Lewis and Donald Rosenberg review the Cleveland Orchestra in alternation. What? a newspaper showing itself to be impartial and unbiased? [Los Angeles Times]


• Anne Fontaine is making a film about Coco Chanel, and she cast cute-as-a-button gamine Audrey Tautou in the title role. The first photograph of Tautou in the role has been published. [Le Figaro]


• To go with the big Rothko exhibit at the Tate Modern, take the Rothko poll: majestic talent or boring? [The Guardian]


• Composer Jake Heggie has officially volunteered to be Barack Obama's Music Education Czar. [Playbill Arts]


• The big news of the rentrée littéraire in France this fall is the mysterious dual-authored novel Ennemis publics. Michel Houllebecq was the known author, but it was revealed this week that the other, secret author of the book, to be released on October 8, is Bernard-Henry Lévy. [Le Figaro]


• Simon Schama's latest review reminds me that I need to get to that Richard Avedon exhibit at the Corcoran. [The Guardian]


• From Mark Barry, the lounger chair called Heat Exchanger by David Hess, mentioned in Mark's post earlier this week, was purchased by a collector and donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Congratulations, David! [Flickr]