James Levine, music director of both the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has withdrawn from the rest of the summer Tanglewood Festival in order to have a kidney removed. Here’s the press release:

BSO MUSIC DIRECTOR JAMES LEVINE…

This was my response to comments on the “Talk of the Day” blog: Are corporate sponsorships a good or bad thing?

A few points:

1) Corporate sponsorships are standard in most cities. The SLSO has had its share of them…

Hitting print too late to be included in Sunday’s roundup of other critics’ opinions of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis season just ended was Heidi Waleson’s review for The Wall Street Journal.

Published in the weekend edition of July…

Webster University has a new music department chairman: he’s Jeffrey Carter, whose background is as a singer, voice teacher and choral director.

Carter’s a smart and charming man with deep Missouri roots — and a degree from the University of…

It’s a boy for St. Louis Symphony Orchestra president Fred Bronstein and his wife, Liz: two weeks ago, they adopted a Nevada-born, ethnic-Chinese baby who now bears the bigger-than-he-is name of Max Russell Jing-qi Bronstein.

The infant Max, now a…

MusicalAmerica.com, linking to an article in The Economist, says that the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD broadcasts are performing as intended: bringing new audiences to opera — and lowering the snobbish perception of the Met itself.

Last year, over 600 theaters…

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra is accepting entries for its third annual Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Competition for Women Composers.

The international competition offers a $10,000 prize and a chance for the winner to have her work given its premiere as a…

“Whither Withering Criticism?” asks Justin Davidson in today’s MusicalAmerica.com. Davidson, the former music critic for Newsday, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2002, and currently music and architecture critic at New York Magazine, has some good points –…

This just in: Thursday, August 7th will be “Christine Brewer Day” in St. Louis.

Things are still falling into place, but this much is set: Mayor Francis Slay will read the proclamation over the air on KFUO (99.1 FM), with…

Theories about the legendary sound of the violins of Antonio Stradivari and other violin-makers in early 18th-century Cremona abound. Did they have a special way of treating the wood? Was the secret in the varnish?

A new scientific study finds…