In Brief: Call Your Mother Edition

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

• Graffiti Artist DeckTwo has covered the restrooms at Philippe Pasqua's Storage gallery with his tag art. In other "art" news a group in Italy constructed a replica of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, made out of toasted bread slices on the ground in a public piazza (video at right). [Libération]


• This is the fifth annual weekend of free opera performances at theaters around Europe, called Tous à l'opéra ! in France. The national host this year is French soprano Nathalie Manfrino.
  [Le Monde]


• As long suspected after he stepped down from his post with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine has canceled almost all of his engagements at the Metropolitan Opera and Tanglewood for the rest of the year. La Cieca says what many are thinking but don't want to say out loud: this is the end. [Parterre Box]


• Scarily coinciding with the long-awaited end of Osama bin Laden last weekend, Daniel Barenboim brought music into the midst of another war zone, with a concert in Gaza. [New York Times]


• For your online listening this week, a set of Brandenburg Concertos by an ensemble new to my ears, Les Inventions; Patrizia Ciofi with the Orchestre symphonique de Lille in Mahler's fourth symphony; Renaud Capuçon, Daniel Müller-Schott, and Nicholas Angelich; the Emerson Quartet playing Thomas Adès' string quartet; and Vivaldi's Orlando Furioso with Ensemble Matheus. [France Musique]


• This week's concert picks in the Washington area. [DCist]


• In music video online this week, a selection of music by Grétry and his contemporary Henri-Joseph Rigel, both favorites of Marie-Antoinette, performed at Versailles. [Arte Live Web]


• Also, Menahem Pressler playing a recital at the Cité de la Musique: Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Debussy. [Medici.tv]