In Brief: Almost August Edition

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

• 
  A mosaic representing Apollo and the Muses has been found in Rome, under the Baths of Trajan near the Coliseum. Specialists say it is in good condition and can be dated to the years between 64 and 109 AD. [Le Monde]


• For your online listening, concerts from the Festival de Forcalquier, the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon (including Henning Kraggerud's piano trio), Verdi's I Masnadieri, the Quatuor Parisii, and the Quatuor Varèse (playing Luca Antignani's Requiem per una maschera from 2004). [France Musique]


• In online video, Modo Antiquo performing Vivaldi's Juditha triumphans and Nikolai Lugansky at La Roque d'Anthéron. [ARTE Liveweb]


• French publisher Hachette has struck a deal with Google, allowing the American company to digitize some 50,000 books from its catalogue. [Le Monde]


• The music of French electroacoustic composer Pierre Henry is being featured again at the Paris Quartier festival this summer, including a performance of the new work, L'Art de la fugue odyssée, described as "a vast and tasty sonic tapestry in 3D." Two themes from the Bach work are quoted throughout this long work, involving violas da gamba, saxophones in unequal temperament, Baroque organ, piano, voice, pop rhythms here and there, making up "a polyphony of recorded sounds, a true symphony of vast and true proportions." The concerts, in the church of Saint-Eustache, are a retrospective of the composer's "liturgical music," including the Voile d'Orphée (1953) and the Messe pour le temps présent (1967). [Le Monde]


• From London this week, audio of the Mariinsky Theater Chorus in an all-Rachmaninoff program, Les Talens Lyriques with Christophe Rousset, Stephen Hough with the BBC Philharmonic, Donald Runnicles conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (including the world premiere of a new concert for orchestra by Robin Holloway), the Tallis Scholars, and Christian Tetzlaff with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. [BBC Proms]


• Leonidas Kavakos, Yuja Wang, Kim Kashkashian, the Quatuor Ébène, Joshua Bell, Denis Matsuev, and more, in online video from the Verbier Festival. [Medici.tv]