In Brief: Almost Halloween Edition

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

• Washington is preparing for the opening of Lucrezia Borgia next weekend, and the company debut of Renée Fleming. It is the role in which she was infamously booed at La Scala. But why did it happen? America's Soprano spoke to Tim Smith about it. [Baltimore Sun]


• La Cieca's post about Fleming's Lucrezia, with an audio clip from La Scala (how does she do it?), has 356 comments at the time of this posting. [Parterre Box]


• Our Girl in Milan has the journalistic evidence relating to that fateful night. [Opera Chic]


• Who said the national candidates do not have time to talk about classical music? [Think Denk]


• Ned Rorem has turned 85. Bon anniversaire! [South Florida Classical Review]


• Bob Shingleton has some photographs of a new modernistic updating of monastic architecture. [On an Overgrown Path]


• Where I come from, we throw octopi on the ice. In Sweden, they throw something else. [Puck Daddy]