He played concertos with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland, Philadelphia and other top orchestras until , in 1998, he underwent gender realignment surgery and became Sara Davis Buechner.

Since then, says Buechner, US orchs have slammed their doors. If it weren’t for Canada, she’d despair.

‘Canada was my salvation in many ways,” she tells the Calgary Herald. ‘The conductors and presenters in Canada were much more open, because they hadn’t really known me. They judged me on the music itself.’

Early on, Buechner won the Gold Medal of the 1984 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, Utah, and came third in the 1986 Tchaikowsky International Piano Competition in Moscow.

A Dvorak concerto last month in Victoria shows the pianist at full pitch. Watch.

Canada’s former prime minister Joe Clark got the gift of his life when his wife, Maureen McTeer, announced at a National Arts Centre Orchestra concert in Ottawa that the family had commissioned a work in his name from composer John Estacio.

Clark, who will be 75, was ever a keen supporter of the arts.

Is there any serving PM who would be equally touched and thrilled by such a gift?

Speaking on China television, the opera legend talked of his love of soccer – as a former goalkeeper – and his confidence in the success of the Spanish Succession.

‘I think the king did well because his father paved the way and he will pave the way for his son. The son is very well prepared, he will be an important king as his father has been.’

Restless, ambitious and increasingly international, English National Opera has reached out to Sarah Billinghurst, who retires next month after 20 years as assistant general manager for artistic affairs at the Metropolitan Opera – the company’s number 2 in all but name.

Sarah, who is keen to spends more time with her husband, has agreed to become a board member at English National Opera, advising on talent and artistic development. She has a close working relationship with ENO’s artistic director John Berry, developed over several successful co-productions.

‘It seemed a very good thing to do,’ Sarah told slippedisc.com, ‘because I love what John does and we have worked together on quite a few shows. I’ve never had much to do with boards before, so it’s something new. It involves five or six meetings a year, either in person or by phone.’

That may be an under-estimate. Sarah will get called on often to advise on matters great and small. Her recruitment is a considerable coup for a company whose work tends to be appreciated more on the world stage than in domestic media. She’s a big feather in John Berry’s cap.

Aside from ENO, Sarah is also serving on the boards of risen-from-dead Santa Fe Opera and talent-store Juilliard School.

Frederica Von Stade announced her retirement three years ago. For many opera singers, that is often the prelude to a second career, sometimes in lighter stuff.

Flicka has choses a coffin. A piece called A Coffin in Egypt by Ricky Ian Gordon. Playing in Philadelphia.

Ready for burial by the Classical Review. 

The long-unsettled Liceu opera house in Barcelona is thinking big. Having lost its stabilising chief Joan Matabosch to Madrid, it has swooped in the close season for Christina Scheppelmann, director general of the Royal Opera House in Muscat, Oman.

Scheppelmann was previously director of artistic operations at the National Opera in Washington DC, effectively artistic director in the perpetual absence of its nominal chief, Placido Domingo. She had held the same job before that in San Francisco. She knows the opera world inside out and, at an early stage, filled a junior job at the Liceu. It’s a homecoming for Christina, and relief for Barcelona.

She will start work full-time in January 2015.

Sonja Mottl, who sang 1,396 times at the Volksoper and on its tours to the US and USSR, has died at the age of 91. A natural soubrette, she sang roles in favourites operettas and several musicals. She was married twice – to the baritone Kurt Preger, who died in 1960, then to the Volksoper director Karl Dönch.

An old Melodiya recording sleeve informs me that ‘unfortuately, his works are hardly known, even in his adopted home of Russia. However, his work is highly valued and has been much admired amongst other composers and musicians.’

How is it possible, you wonder, that the composer who was closest to Dmitri Shostakovich, in both friendship and style, could remain unknown to a world that reveres Shostakovich?

Well, the ice is breaking and Mieczelaw Weinberg is finally starting to get heard.

But where should a new listener begin?

I try to answer both of the above questions in a sinfini composer guide. Click here to read.

The conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, an avowed Anglophile, has ended his three-year survey of English music, titled ‘Albion’, with a rare performance of The Critic, an opera by Charles Villiers Stanford, after Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Since 2011, Gennady has conducted 38 works by 20 composers, ranging from Elgar’s Enigma Variations to such esoterica as Cyril Scott’s violin concerto. Here’s a summary of the series (in Russian).

Eve Queler has been conducting little-known bel canto operas at Carnegie for so long that her performances are taken for granted and generally ignored by the hype machine that is the late New York Times.

This week was not different. Eve, herself no adolescent, brought back an Italian soprano who has sung often at the Met without ever enjoying the acclaim she attracts back home. Mariella Devia is now 66. She sang Queen Elizabeth, a woman her own age, in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. And the audience erupted.

Read all about it in quick-off-the-mark NYCR. Right here.

René Heinersdorff, one of the busiest and most enthusiastic German concert organisers, has died, aged 77.

Trained at Steinways, he started out in the mid-1970s, presenting concerts in Düsseldorf and Cologne. Before long, he was known to artists and audiences alike as a businessman who shared their passion. His website lists upcoming dates with Neville Marriner, Daniel Hope, Rollando Villazon, Janine Jansen, Philippe Jarousky and the Moscow Cathedral Chorus.

Colleagues today called him ‘irreplaceable’.