MUSIClassical ALLEGRO
Topic: NEWS composers
German city of Eisenach is now launching a campaign to publicise its association with the most famous of all baroque musicians...JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH... after decades during which the composer was hijacked by various ideologies, including nazism and communism. It rankles with the Eisenachers that his name is so little associated with the place. "You hear the name Salzburg, and you immediately think of Mozart," said the museum's marketing manager Silvia Hochkirch. "My life's aim is to ensure that Eisenach is one day similarly connected in minds across the world with Bach." See all stories on this topic | Guardian Unlimited - UK | GOOGLE 'BACH' | GOOGLE 'EISENACH'
The famed tenor's work on the recording of classical religious music should be finished by the end of August or September, his London-based manager, Terri Robson, said Tuesday in a telephone interview. => Read more! 
Details about the 2007 Karl Haas Prize for Music Education awarded to
Beverly Sills, the Brooklyn-born opera diva who was a global icon of can-do American culture with her dazzling voice, bubbly personality and management moxie in the arts world, died Monday [2 JUL 2007] of cancer, her manager said. She was 78. It had been revealed just last month that Sills was gravely ill with inoperable lung cancer. Born Belle Miriam Silverman in Brooklyn, the coloratura soprano made her opera debut in 1947 in Philadelphia in a bit role in "Carmen." She became a star with the smaller New York City Opera, where she first performed in 1955 in Johann Strauss Jr.'s "Die Fledermaus." She was acclaimed for performances in such operas as Douglas Moore's "The Ballad of Baby Doe," Massenet's "Manon" and Handel's "Giulio Cesare." She didn't appear at the Met until 1975, shortly before her retirement from singing, which made it surprising when the Met asked her to sit on its board in 2002. 
Pianist MATTHEW KENNEDY found his calling sharing music with world... Film honors Jubilee Singers director.
From birth, pianist Jonathan Biss lived in a world of music. His mother, the Romanian-born Miriam Fried, is a globe-trotting violinist who also performs and records with the Mendelssohn String Quartet. His father, violinist Paul Biss, teaches at Indiana University's prestigious School of Music in Bloomington, where Jonathan spent his childhood. Furthermore, his grandmother, the acclaimed Raya Garbousova, earned the highest praise from legendary cellist-conductor Pablo Casals, who called her the "finest cellist" he had ever heard. Samuel Barber wrote his cello concerto for her, and she performed its world premiere in 1946. 
King was a noted champion of obscure clarinet works of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly those of Bernhard Crusell, Franz Krommer, Louis Spohr, Carl Stamitz and Carl Maria von Weber. An accomplished pianist, she won a piano scholarship to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music, where she was a pupil of Arthur Alexander and clarinetist Frederick Thurston. "In those days it helped if you played two instruments, however poorly," The Daily Telegraph quoted her once saying. At the piano King often accompanied her clarinetist peers, including Gervase de Peyer and Colin Davis. 
Dorothy Maynor in Concert at the 
Artur Balsam In Concert at the Manhattan School of Music; Artur Balsam,
The Associated Press is reporting that soprano and arts administrator Beverly Sills is critically ill in a New York City hospital.
