In Brief: No Shutdown Edition

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

• The curtain of the new Oslo Opera House looks like a bunch of crumpled tin foil. It is the work of Los Angeles-based artist Pae White, and it was made by "scanning crumpled aluminum foil and translating that data into instructions for a computer-controlled loom that wove the material out of cotton, wool, and polyester. [Boing Boing]


• With hat tip to Alex Baker -- the real reason why Glenn Beck is out at Fox? An ill-advised dalliance with amateur theater criticism, of course. Leave the reviewing to the professionals, please! [Culture Monster]


• Tim Smith reports that the Castleton Festival is coming back to the Washington area this summer, when the Castleton Festival Orchestra plays a concert of music inspired by Shakespeare on June 30 at Strathmore. Sure, it's the usual suspects -- Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Mendelssohn -- but it will also feature readings by Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons. [Baltimore Sun]


• Twitter lit up this week with a fun hashtag competition, featuring ingenious mash-ups of movie titles with names of conductors. Here are the ones I came up with but was too lazy to tweet. Some suggestions for HIP conductors: The Last Temptation of Christie | The Great Alessandrini | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Harnoncourt | Conversations with My Gardiner | Ed Hogwood | A Man for Savall Seasons | The Two Jacobs | From Herreweghe to Eternity | Les bronzés font du Minkowski. Some local ones: Meet Me in St. Reilly Lewis | Saving Private Ryan Brown | Antony Walker and Cleopatra | Restrepovich. [#conductormovies]


• With hat tip to Tyler Cowen, Frédéric Lefebvre was at the Paris book fair last week to flog his book Le mieux est l'ami du bien. When asked by a reporter about his favorite book, he tripped up and -- probably by accident -- misnamed Voltaire's Zadig as "Zadig et Voltaire," the name of a chain of French fashion stores. This has spawned a wave of Twitter derision (and a hashtag -- #bibliolefebvre), with literary types creating mash-ups of book titles and fashion names, like The Girl with the La Perla to The World According to Gap, Thus Spake Zara, Waiting for Gaultier and Victor Hugo Boss's Les Misérables. [The Guardian]


• The Opéra-Comique in Paris opened a new production of Weber's rarely heard opera Der Freischütz this week. Marie-Aude Roux says that the musical component -- the Orchestre révolutionnaire et romantique and Monteverdi Choir conducted by John Eliot Gardiner -- was excellent; the staging by Dan Jemmett not so much. [Le Monde]


• Online concerts from France-Musique this month include a recital of piano trios by Haydn and Schumann by Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras, and Alexander Melnikov at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (April 1); pianoforte player Andreas Staier in a Schumann program with violinist Christoph Prégardien and tenor Christoph Prégardien (April 3); the Ensemble Intercontemporain performing music of Julian Anderson, Elliott Carter (On Conversation with Paradise), and Kaija Saariaho (Graal Théâtre) (April 4); Brahms piano trios (including the original version of op. 8, discussed yesterday) with the Capuçon brothers and Nicolas Angelich (April 5); a rebroadcast of the gala concert that opened the new opera house of the Bastille in 1989 (April 8); and a rebroadcast of a performance of Rossini's Moïse, under Wolfgang Sawallish in Munich (April 8). Click on the headphone icon to get to the streaming audio. [Les concerts à l'antenne]