Bregenz has announced an unspecified three-year sponsorship deal with the carmaker.

The lakeside festival has a 20 million Euro summer budget.

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Shocking news this morning of a domestic gas explosion in Milan that killed Micaela Masella and left her two children and her husband, Giuseppe Pellicanò, in hospital with severe burns.

Micaela, 43, was an events coordinator at the Centre for Choreographic Studies founded by her parents, retired San Carlo dancers Aldo Masella and Renata Bestetti.

Our thoughts are with them.

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It was touch and go in Chicago last night as to whether the Grant Park Music Festival would open on time.

The organisers cancelled the opening concert late yesterday afternoon after the orchestra, represented by Chicago Federation of Musicians, Local 10-208, called a strike.

Late in the day, agreement was reached. Carlos Kalmar will lead the Grant Park Orchestra tonight in a programme of Barber, Poulenc, and Mussorgsky.

Story here.

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In the decades that Herbert von Karajan bestrode Berlin, Salzburg and the music industry, he could always be assured of a warm review from Klaus Geitel, who has died at the age of 92.

And not just a newspaper review and broadcast effusion. Geitel often wrote Karajan’s record blurbs. He published a fawning iconography of the image-obsessed conductor and was hostile only to those who dared to suggest that his idol might be infallible. Even in the old man’s half-crazed final showdown with the Berlin Philharmonic, he unerringly saw the world through Karajan’s eyes.

Although he called himself a journalist, Geitel belonged to an old-world genre of stage-door Johnnies and cocktail-hour hangers-on who were happiest when posing for camera with their idols.

He was, equally old-world, unfailingly polite to sceptics like myself. May he rest in peace.

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