Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press has been writing some unusually meaty feature stories whose web incarnations come equipped not only with music stories but with videos. Here's a piece on Leon Kirchner, and here's a profile of pianist Jeremy Denk.... A mobile-phone salesman and part-time opera singer named Paul Potts recently showed up on Britain's Got Talent in the UK and sang an abridged but roughly affecting "Nessun dorma," to the supposed astonishment of Simon Cowell. When I checked yesterday the video had been viewed 300,000 times; now it's 600,000. [By evening, 1,000,000.] The comments are mostly variations on "I don't like opera, but I love this"; my favorite is "I feel gay for liking this." There's a lot more where this came from, YouTube masses. Try Corelli or Del Monaco. (Via Fiona Gilsenan.)... On the NY Times ArtsBeat blog, Tony Tommasini has additional reports from the reopening of the Southbank Centre and from Aldeburgh. A choice detail: when he visited the graves of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, he found two brown rabbits there, nibbling on the grass. For more Aldeburgh coverage, take the Overgrown Path.
