Back-to-school reminder about student prices at Lincoln Center and elsewhere: Chamber Music Society, 50% off or $10 day-of; Great Performers, $20; Metropolitan Opera, $25-35 day-of; City Opera, 50% off or $16 day-of; New York Philharmonic, $12; Carnegie Hall, $10-15. So, what are the student prices to see Justin Timberlake and other Artists of the People?... Too Many Tristans has a diverting post entitled Greatest Classical CD Covers EVER? There's a sequel here.... A reader found a heroic tale on Craiglist. Apparently a patron at the San Francisco Ballet became fed up with people who were performing the lamentably familiar gesture of walking out as the dancers took their bows. The patron, an elegant grey-haired man, suddenly yelled: "WILL YOU PEOPLE SIT DOWN AND LET THE POLITE PEOPLE SHOW THEIR APPRECIATION?!" — slight pause — "YA ASSHOLES!" God bless you.... Nick Scholl on Jane Eaglen.... Make what you will of "Airports, Mortality, and the Truly Captive Audience," a 3000-word essay by American Idol runner-up Justin Guarini.... "Casta Diva" has become a political weapon, as Minnesota Public Radio's John Birge notes.... Molly Sheridan elegantly flushes this week's classical pseudo-story with the line "Beethoven — still dead!".... Variety reports that Jamie Foxx is to play a homeless L.A. cellist in a movie called Soloist. The script is based on a real-life character depicted by Steve Lopez in a series of LA Times articles. In one piece Lopez describes the cellist's visit to the LA Philharmonic; the film may contain a corresponding scene. Wouldn't it be nice if a Hollywood movie portrayed orchestral musicians as real people and not as misshapen stereotypes? Foxx, who studied piano in his youth and convincingly portrayed Ray Charles in Ray, seems to be approaching his task seriously; he is said to be taking intensive cello lessons with an LA Phil cellist.
— Don Giovanni, René Jacobs conducting (Harmonia Mundi)
— Music by Ralph Shapey; Miranda Cuckson, violin, and Blair McMillen, piano (Centaur)
— Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Claudio Abbado conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (Lucerne Festival Edition)
— Manu Chao, La Radiolina (Nacional)
— Alkan, Concerto for Piano, Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)
— Measha Brueggergosman, Surprise: Songs of Bolcom, Schoenberg, and Satie, with David Robertson conducting the BBC Symphony (DG)
— Howard Skempton, Ben Somewhen (NMC)
