Topic: NEWS performers
Seattle Symphony conductor and music director Gerard Schwarz broke his left leg and ankle last Thursday in a skiing accident. He faces surgery later this week, the SSO reports, with full recovery expected. In fact, the athletic Schwarz was conducting a recording session this morning, seated. He returned from the slopes Friday, thinking it was just a strain, but discovered the breaks at the doctor. He's now mastering a new art--crutches.


MUSIClassical ALLEGRO
Zara Dolukhanova, a well-known singer died [5 DEC 2007] at the age of 90, in Moscow. The years of her creative activities are closely related with the Soviet Communist years. She was the first actress to play Cinderella in that opera, and Rozina in “Barber of Seville”. Dolukhanova popularized many folk works.
Andrew Imbrie, the composer of many arresting and impeccably crafted musical works and a generous teacher to several generations of younger composers, died Wednesday, 5 DEC 2007, at his Berkeley, California home after a long illness. He was 86. Mr. Imbrie's music, which included operas, symphonies, concertos and a wealth of chamber scores, was a predominating presence in the musical life of the Bay Area for many decades. His opera "Angle of Repose," based on Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was commissioned and premiered by the San Francisco Opera in 1976.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most important and controversial postwar composers who helped shape a new understanding of sound through electronic compositions, died at his home in western Germany. He was 79. Stockhausen, who gained fame through his avant-garde works in the 1960s and '70s and later composed works for huge theaters and other projects, died in the town of Kuerten on Wednesday, 5 DEC 2007, his publisher, the Stockhausen Verlag, said. No cause of death was given.
On Tuesday, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 99th birthday by attending the first U.S. staging of his characteristically dense opera "What Next?" It's 40 minutes of musical searching by a handful of characters brought together in a car accident. The production includes soprano and new-music specialist Susan Narucki, plus the Juilliard-affiliated ensemble AXIOM and conductor Jeffrey Milarsky. 
One of just two surviving pages from a Mozart manuscript has been sold at an auction in London for £110,900. The folio, from the composer's draft for the Sinfonia Concertante, has set a new record for a single page of his work, which has stood since 1998. The item was purchased from Sotheby's by dealers based in London who were bidding on behalf of a private client. The violin, viola and orchestral work was composed in 1779, securing Mozart's standing as a great composer aged 23.
Veronica Borisovna Dudarova was born on December 5, 1916, in Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan)...Dudarova is an outstanding symphony conductor of our time. She is registered in the Guinness Book of Records as the only woman in the world to have headed large philharmonic orchestras for over half a century. 