In Brief: Kennedy Center Opera Edition

Here is your regular Sunday Monday (delayed by illness) selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• A Cooper's hawk has taken up temporary residence in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been trying to capture the hawk, but the bookish raptor has eluded them so far, eating just enough of the baited quail not to trigger the traps intended to catch it. [DCist]


• Kudos to Anne Midgette for getting an article about classical music placed on a newspaper's front page, an article confirming the rumors, circulating for months, that the Kennedy Center will absorb the Washington National Opera, after issues surrounding the payment of the company's outstanding debts were happily resolved. [Washington Post]


• Photographer Patrick Chauvel imagines what it would look like if the Tour de Montparnasse in Paris were exploded by a bomb or plane attack like the World Trade Center. [Lunettes Rouges]


• English pianist James Rhodes, a talented musician with a troubled personal history, aims to bring classical music to a broader audience, "like a Jamie Oliver of the grand piano," to make classical music "easy, accessible and fun." [The Observer]


• Is Frank Gehry's new interactive concert hall for the New World Symphony in Miami Beach the wave of the future for classical music? It sounds like an awful lot of distractions from listening to music for my taste. [Washington Post]


• My weekly picks for concerts this week in the Washington area. [Classical Music Agenda]


• Once again, the Internet has justified its existence. [White People Rapping Poorly]


• What to do with Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961)? The decision by the French government to include his name in a collection announcing artistic anniversaries for the year has drawn anger over his (admittedly disgusting) anti-Semitic writings. Leaders of Jewish groups in France compared the decision to honor Céline to a desire to honor Pétain. [Le Monde]