Music News:
    Back In Samuel Barber's Day, He Was No Critics' Favorite: "In particular, critic and composer Virgil Thomson dismissed Barber as a composer for 'high middlebrow taste.' And Barber's music does sound conservative next to the atonal, modernist style in vogue in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. If the scathing reviews bothered Barber, he tried not to show it."...

    For City Opera, 2010-11 To Be Another Slender Season: But general manager and artistic director George Steel "said that this season City Opera expects to balance its budget for the first time in years. 'The company is light-years ahead of where we were last year at this time,' he said. 'There are still significant challenges, but we are working very hard to address them.'"...

    Reconsidering Classical Music's No Applause Rule: Alex Ross: "Programme booklets sometimes contain a list of rules, rendered in the style of God on Mount Sinai," telling people when it is and isn't acceptable to applaud. "The underlying message of the protocol is, in essence: 'Curb your enthusiasm. Don't get too excited.' Should we be surprised that people aren't as excited about classical music as they used to be?"...

    The Next Dudamel? Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition Crowns Third Winner: "The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra's [third] International Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition has been won by [a] 31-year-old Latvian, Ainars Rubikis. … Since its launch only six years ago it has become one of Europe's most important conducting competitions" … notably because the first winner was Gustavo Dudamel....

    Why 'Nixon In China' Is No 'CNN Opera': Mark Swed: "Anyone who took a close look at Nixon in China discovered that it was not 'CNN opera,' despite the historical accuracy of the libretto: It was a boldly anti-CNN opera. Its concern was everything that they didn't tell you on television. … [It] was not about what Nixon meant for China but what China meant for Nixon."...

Theatre News:
    B'way's God of Carnage Seeks Starry, All-Black Cast: "Yasmina Reza, zee French lady who wrote zee play, has OK'd the idea, and so the search is on for four major stars. ... Broadway shows with black stars can be box-office gold -- and, in many cases, the productions are critic-proof."...

    No More Raunchy Bathrooms, Public Theater Says: Monday's "symbolic ground-breaking at the downtown theater complex that produced 'Hair' and 'A Chorus Line' launched a $35 million, two-year project to expand and modernize the building's facade and cramped common areas."...

    Is There Room Onstage For Moral Ambiguity About War?: "I've sat through 'anti-war' theatre from the satire on Lyndon Johnson, McBird, through Rolf Hochhuth's conspiracist anti-Churchill play Soldiers, to David Hare's relatively subtle Stuff Happens. I've seen dozens of 'em. The thought is -- or was -- could there be a pro-war play?"...

    Comparing West End Notes With The Stranger To His Left: "Both of us lost sensation in the right leg first, and that meant we both stopped feeling the pain of the opera glasses embedding themselves into the right knee. We talked about the show and discussed the prices. She thought they were disgraceful."...

    Nightingale: Years Have Not Been Kind To The Phantom: "[T]his Phantom is not the phantom we knew. The 'poisoned gargoyle who burns in hell' has clearly taken an anger management course in New York. ... Would he whimsically hang the backstage crew or send a chandelier crashing into a crowd? Not any more."...

Art News:
    NYT's Bruce Graham Obit Pictures Wrong Hancock Building: Chicago architect, Chicago skyscraper -- but the Times' national edition "runs a picture of Boston's John Hancock Tower ... not Chicago's John Hancock Center, which was Graham's greatest skyscraper."...

    There Are 8 Million Sketches In The Naked City: Or there will be, if a 27-year-old artist completes his self-appointed "mission to sketch every person in New York City, all 8,363,710." He "had only just dropped anchor in a studio apartment the size of a city bus when he began the dogged pursuit of his expansive goal with nothing more than a black pen and a notebook the size of a DVD box."...

    Record Number Of Dealers Flocking To $2.7 Billion Tefaf: "The 23rd annual edition of the European Fine Art Fair -- Tefaf -- in the Dutch city of Maastricht will be the year's first test of demand from buyers outside the auction rooms, where wealthy collectors have been pushing up prices."...

    Artes Mundi Artists Are International, Little-Known: "There was no sight of a light being turned off and on at the preview opening of the fourth Artes Mundi prize exhibition in Cardiff. This was big subject art tackling subjects from post-communist social order to consumerism and globalisation. The prize of £40,000 is one of the most lucrative in the world and the biggest in the UK."...

    Has Caravaggio Dethroned Michelangelo?: "Caravaggiomania ... suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people." Meanwhile, Caravaggio "exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible."...