The pianist Emanuel Ax and the soprano Dawn Upshaw presented works by Chopin and Schumann at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night.

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Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek used his South by Southwest interactive keynote to announce a fair number of subscriptions If you were hoping that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek would use his South by Southwest Interactive keynote to announce a launch date for the US, no such luck (although Rafat has a source who says possibly end of May). Ek’s biggest bit of news: Spotify now has more than 320,000 paid …

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The Judas Tree was the last ballet created by Sir Kenneth MacMillan before he died – and it is his darkest. The plot is an allegory of Christ’s betrayal and the setting is a building site in Canary Wharf. One woman appears within a group of construction workers, their foreman and a Jesus-like character. She is a beauty and sexually provocative, driving the men mad with frustration until they …

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St. (a traditional Irish abbreviation for “Stanley”) Patrick was a Druid leprechaun who, in ancient times, lived in medieval Ireland.

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When the Greek pop star Julia Alexandratou released her anthemic 2007 single “The Target is Cash”, she was seen as the definition of a good-time gold-digger in Athens’ free-spending, credit-fuelled Noughties. The racy accompanying video helped the 23-year-old Greek-Briton to minor celebrity status.

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The re-sale of cancelled Glastonbury tickets happens Sunday, April 11 , at 9am. It will be the final time prospective punters have of going to this year’s festival.

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Jewel in the crown … Ballet Nacional’s Giselle If Fidel Castro is the lifelong patriarch of the Cuban nation, Alicia Alonso is the lifelong matriarch of its national ballet . Like Cuba itself, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba , which Alonso founded and still rules, is utterly distinctive: it fields world-class dancers at the same time as remaining culturally isolated from the wider ballet world.

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Harrow’s pop princess explains her feminism influenced new album, taking a year off to work with victims of domestic violence and why she won’t be selling her music to TV adverts.

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PageBreak — OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA Zeffirelli’s beloved production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” with Anna Netrebko, Piotr Beczała, Ruth Ann Swenson, and George Petean; Marco Armiliato conducts. (March 17 at 8 and March 20 at 1. These are the final performances . . .

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The American Ballet Theater alumni Angel Corella now has his own dance company, the Corella Ballet Castilla y León, which opens on Wednesday night at City Center.

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Cheryl Cole has been forced to pull out of a string of appearances after being struck down with a bout of bronchitis.

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A “great performers” season, showcasing the Barbican’s classical music programme, will kick off this autumn as the Houston Symphony play Gustav Holst’s symphonic classic The Planets on 16 October.

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As the first Aboriginal woman to make a solo recording, Ruby Hunter was a role model for many Australians. A member of the infamous “stolen generations”, she was once labelled a “juvenile delinquent”, spent time in various institutions and survived homelessness before finding the strength and confidence to follow a career in music.

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A LONG-lost musical tribute to the capital has been unearthed after 70 years stuffed in a file at a university library.

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EMI told not to sell single tracks as downloads in ruling which could mean further losses for music label Pink Floyd, the British rock group behind platinum-selling albums The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, today secured a legal victory for the much-maligned genre of the concept album against the apparently inexorable march of the instant pop download. In a high court ruling that led the …

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Prince of Wales at the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s 20th Anniversary.

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AUDIENCES at tomorrow night’s Glasgow performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony will hear a very different piece from Edinburgh audiences at the Usher Hall on Friday. To

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Singer Charlotte Church agrees a £2m deal with a music investment company to finance her next record.

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When you sing along to the radio, is your brain processing the words and music separately or as one’

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A trumpet which was played at dances at Balmoral Castle in the 1940s and 1950s fails to sell at auction.

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Madness and Prodigy added to festival line-up

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The French navy has captured 35 suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia in what French officials are hailing as the most successful mission since the European Union began monitoring the seas in 2008.

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Why do models insist on branching out to be acrtors or clothes designers’ And what’s with all the striped scarves on News at Ten’ What on earth are we to make of Kate Moss’s upcoming ballet debut’ Sharon, by email We are to assume that the end is nigh, Sharon. But I’m not sure if news that Kate is to appear in a ballet movie with Mikhail Baryshnikov is more or less depressing than the fact that …

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PageBreak — OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA Zeffirelli’s beloved production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” with Anna Netrebko, in opulent voice, and Piotr Beczała, a tenor with a broad, healthy sound who is fast becoming a house favorite, and a cast that includes . . .

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BBC Sound of 2010 winner Ellie Goulding goes straight to the top of the album chart with her debut release Lights.

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A SCOTTISH ballet teacher allegedly abducted a male pupil and had sex with him during a three-month affair.

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For his current extended visit to New York, the conductor Riccardo Muti is on a mission, it would seem, to reclaim neglected works.

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This summer’s V Festival has sold out in record time with tickets snapped up in just 90 minutes.

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Meet the new kids on the rock… a series of famous album covers have been recreated swapping the original stars for children.

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SCO CL@SIX – BAROQUE MASTERS **** ST CUTHBERT’S PARISH CHURCH, EDINBURGH

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Cairo An Egyptian appeals court has ordered a retrial of the property tycoon and politician Hesham Talaat Moustafa.

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Doves have been added to the line-up of this year’s V Festival. The Mancunian trio – who released fourth album Kingdom Of Rust last year – will play the 4 Music stage at the two-site event in August.

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WITHOUT audiences, the performing arts world would simply not exist. The equation is one based on spiritual presence as well as the plain reality that “bums-on-seats

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During its tours, the Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra endures conditions more typical for a low-level minor league baseball team than a group of highly trained classical musicians.

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American Ballet Theater says it will skip its regular two weeks of performances next fall and use the time to rehearse its new “Nutcracker” production.

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HE CAME down the aircraft steps in the uniform of a sergeant but was greeted as the King.

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An album by US producer Danger Mouse will finally see the light of day this year, after its original release was scuppered by a legal wrangle with EMI.

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Singer Cheryl Cole, who last week announced her split from husband Ashley Cole, has been lined up to perform solo at this year’s V Festival.

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CD sales still heading south, though Universal Music, the world’s biggest record label, said digital revenues grew eight per cent in 2009, even though revenue was €4.6bn, 6.2 per cent down on 2008.… What is your recession sales strategy’

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Mr. Coutaz founded the respected independent classical record label Harmonia Mundi and ran it for five decades.

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So what was it that captured Southern California’s dance buffs recently — other than the Olympian figure skaters’ Try a sub rosa contest between women in tulle tutus and men as fierce fugitives.

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As New York City Ballet’s winter season ended, I found myself forgetting the one performance I did see of this season’s only “Liebeslieder” cast but pining to have seen one particular cast change in “Cortège.”

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PageBreak — OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA Instead of capitalizing on the considerable strengths of Verdi’s rough-hewn half-masterpiece “Attila”—strong central characters, crowd scenes crackling with patriotic fervor—the Met has opted for a musclebound attempt at what the director, Pierre Audi, calls a . . .

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Why is Jimi Hendrix like a menorah’ Well, that legendary ancient candleabra in the Holy Temple supposedly had only enough oil to burn for a…

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What’s Your Reaction’ The other day, I found myself rummaging through a closet, searching for my old viola. This wasn’t how I’d planned to spend the afternoon. I hadn’t given a thought to the instrument in years. I barely remembered where it was, much less how to play it.

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What’s Your Reaction’ The other day, I found myself rummaging through a closet, searching for my old viola. This wasn’t how I’d planned to spend the afternoon. I hadn’t given a thought to the instrument in years. I barely remembered where it was, much less how to play it.

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THE final tickets for Scotland’s biggest music festival sold out in less than 90 minutes yesterday.

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Tarkan, the Turkish pop star, was detained by police in a narcotics raid on Friday in Istanbul along with nine other people.

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Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon steps away from the ballet company he founded three years ago.

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The New York publisher and songwriter Aaron Schroeder was one of the key figures around the Brill Building in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a songwriter who preferred to collaborate with others, especially in improving the commerciality of a promising song. Several of his 300 published compositions were recorded by Elvis Presley, including the multi-million seller “It’s Now or Never” (1960). He …

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