This is Ward Stare, new music director of the Rochester Philharmonic. Watch what they make him do.

One  musician thinks this is a good idea. Your views?

A week after the murderous assaults, the chorus of the city’s opera house paid tribute – to the victims and the values of freedom – with Va, pensiero from Verdi’s Nabucco.

Hommage à l’Opéra Bastille – Je suis Charlie by operadeparis

Chorus starts at 4:40.

It is being reported that a budget has been agreed for 2015/16, carried over the opposition of mainstream parties by the former political wing of the Provisional IRA.

It is further leaked that ‘the executive is to give several million pounds to Department for Regional Development for street lighting and also money to help save Ulster Orchestra in the January monitoring round.’

It is to be urgently hoped that they do not allocate the money to an unchanged board. 

UPDATE: But it looks like they will. See here.

Ms Voigt has a book coming out. In it, she tells tales on fellow-divas. For instance:

Covering for Jessye Norman, she learns the soprano must have the air in front of her misted with water to remove the dust as she walks onstage. ‘Don’t you think the HD cameras would just love to see Jessye Norman walking on stage with air being spritzed in front of her?’ demands Voigt.

The interviewer checked this with Ms Norman. ‘I’m afraid that is not a fact,’ Ms Norman told The Wall Street Journal.

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Police with sniffer dogs searched three sites in the theatre complex after a specific bomb threat was received by email at the city prosecutor’s office. No further details have been made public.

Tonight, José Carreras makes his debut in the Mariinsky in the Christian Kolonovits opera, El Juez.

He is expected to dedicate the performance to the memory of Elena Obraztsova, who died this week.

The Alabama Symphony has announced Carlos Izcaray as its next music director. He succeeds Justin Brown, who is British.

A conductor’s son, Carlos Izcaray, 37, presently lives in Germany but will move to Alabama.

His bio relates: At age 3 he was enrolled in Venezuela’s public system of youth orchestras, continuing later from age 7 at the Emil Friedman Conservatory, one of the few schools in the world that promotes music as the root and essence of education. There, he was a boy chorister as well as an instrumentalist. He studied conducting with his father since he was a teenager, and went on to become a distinguished fellow at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen.