Melissa Bayern,  a member of the audience at Manchester’s Royal Exchange stepped up to sing the Witch in Sondheim’s Into the Woods after Gillian Bevan was taken ill.

Bayern, freshly graduated out of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, was making her professional stage debut. Full story exclusively in The Stage.

We reported in recent weeks that the orchestra had been pulled from a stadium by its music director after being told that women could not play, and suspended again when the players wages were not paid.

We hear today from Ali Alexander Rahbari that he has just conducted the orchestra, with women, in the stadium from which they were previously banned. And that everyone has now received 70 percent of their back pay.

A small step for humankind.

The Tehran Symphony will soon go to China. Next year it has been booked to open a Bruckner festival in Austria.

Loren Kitt is retiring after 46 years as principal clarinet of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. He has played Rachmaninov’s second symphony 54 times, with 15 different conductors.

Loren thinks the orchestra is now ‘the best it has ever been’, but it needs a music director who gives life and soul to the enterprise.

‘[Slava Rostropovich] was really invested in the orchestra.  He wanted it to be good. What I would like to see [in the next music director] is somebody who is as dedicated to the orchestra as Slava was. Someone who would hang their star on the orchestra, so that as good as the orchestra got, they would be better too.’

Loren talks here to his colleague Sue Heineman, Principal Bassoon, on the NSO musicians’ site.

The NSO has just appointed Gianandrea Noseda as music director, succeeding Christoph Eschenbach.

Bernard Labadie returns next month to the ensemble he founded, Les Violons du Roy, after an absence of nearly two years. In the interim, he has hovered between life and death.

In a startlingly frank conversation with Arthur Kapitainis, Bernard, 52, talks about conversations with death, life after coma and the fallacies of cancer terminology. ‘When you say you fight a cancer and you win the battle and you’re a winner, does that make the ones who lose the battle losers? I don’t think so.’

Labadie no longer uses a baton. ‘There you can see it,’ he said, holding his right hand out in front of him. ‘The anti-rejection medication that I take makes me shake all the time.’

Read the full article here.

The Government let it be known today that Peter Bazalgette will step down next year after just one term as chair of Arts Council England. Having secured the job through personal connections with the former Hulture (now Health) Secretary Jeremy Qant, Bazza will be neither moped nor missed. He will leave next January.

A glass of Lidl bubbly might be raised at English National Opera, where the present financial crisis began under his chairmanship and which he abandoned for a better job as soon as he could. Although recusing himself from ACE discussions about punitive measures against ENO, Bazza helped stoke hostility towards the company he jettisoned.

Before joining arts boards, Bazza was the man who brought Big Brother to British screens, lowering the public tone more effectively than anyone bar Rupert Murdoch.

Bye, Bazza. It’s been bad, all bad. And a bad example for public service. Go now, while people are still saying nice things.

With a week to go they’re still 13,000 Euros short of target, but one maestro has rallied to the appeal.

Click here to support the refuge.

The BBC have filmed an item on Omo Bello, a geneticist from Nigeria who is making an opera career in Paris after obtaining a French government scholarship. Watch here.

Both suspects in the robbery and murder of Mary Whitaker, a popular New York violinist, have changed their plea to guilty of second-degree murder.

Their trial, which was scheduled for this week, has been cancelled. The killers await sentencing in February and March.

Jonathan Conklin, 44, and Charles Sanford, 31, both homeless, attacked Mary in August 2014 at her summer home in Chataqua County. Mary, who was alone, was shot twice, in the leg and chest.

A well-known freelance musician, she played in several orchestras and was a close friend of the conductor Marin Alsop. The two suspects were arrested within days.

The judicial process is now at an end. Mary can be remembered in future for the joys of her life, not the tragic manner of her death.

He’s a composer, conductor, pianist and writer with a year’s worth of big buzz behind him. The NY Times magazine headlined him the Great Hope of Opera.

Now it has been announced that as of next season, Matthew Aucoin will be spending eight weeks a year at LA Opera, learning the ropes and filling in with all his multifarious skills.

‘I’m honored and humbled,’ says Matthew. 

Hedge-funder Rick Haythornthwaite is to be replaced as chair of London’s South Bank Board by Susan Gilchrist, a former journalist turned CEO of the PR group Brunswick.

After seven years of Rick, bogged down in a redevelopment scheme no outsider wanted, the place desperately needs an uplift.

And not just at board level. An executive shuffle is overdue.

The South Bank has lost its buzz. It will take more than PR sparkle to fix it.

The Bavarian Radio Symphony music director turned 74 yesterday.

Here’s what the orch had in store for him (watch to end). Click here.