In Brief: A Breeze Edition

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

• So sorry to have missed Mobtown Modern's performance of Mauricio Kegel's Eine Brise at Artscape this afternoon. Here is what it looked and sounded like from aboard one of the 111 bicycles it takes to "play" the piece. [TwitVid]


• Andrew Clark reports on an exhibition at Aldeburgh's Red House, on the youth and youthful compositions of Benjamin Britten. The Britten-Pears Foundation is sitting on piles and piles of primary sources in their collection, which they are hoping to have fully recorded in an online catalogue planned for the Britten centenary, coming up in 2013. [Financial Times]


• Oh, good Lord -- Rufus Wainwright camped it up -- pretentiously -- at the Manchester International Festival for the premiere of his new opera, or whatever it is. "Sure enough, while a crowd milled in the lobby before the performance, Mr. Wainwright arrived meticulously made up as Verdi, in a formal 19th-century black suit, complete with white silk scarf, black top hat and a bushy beard grown for the occasion. Mr. Wainwright’s companion, Jorn Weisbrodt, a German theater director, was dressed as a young Puccini in a cream-colored summer suit and a straw hat. The crowd erupted with applause, and lights flashed as people took pictures." Il a le melon -- if Rufus Wainwright actually thinks he can be compared to Verdi... I'm at a loss for words. [New York Times]


• We hope all our friends francophones and francophiles had a good Fête Nationale earlier this week. Reading Adam Gopnik's piece about the festivities in Paris made me really miss France. [New Yorker News Desk]


• This is so dumb. Angelinos just celebrated the musical achievements of a recently deceased man widely believed to be a pedophile, but Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich has called for L.A. Opera's upcoming Ring Festival not to focus on the works of Wagner. He does understand that it is a festival devoted to the Ring, right? Why? Because the festival will "glorify the man whose music and racist anti-Semitic writings inspired Hitler and became the de facto soundtrack for the Holocaust." Mark Swed rejects the dumbness. [Los Angeles Times]


• Wait, just checking the date -- no, it's not April 1. Oscar Wilde's deathbed conversion to Catholicism has apparently caused the Vatican to overlook the rest of the writer's decidedly secular life, at least as expressed in an article recently published in L'Osservatore Romano. [The Times]


• "A Progressive Congressman Promotes Bill In 7/8 Time." [The Onion]