Around The Classical Internet: April 29, 2011

NPR | By Anastasia Tsioulcas

Published April 29, 2011 at 5:38 PM EDT

The week in classical news:

While speculation continues to swirl around what might happen at the Philadelphia Orchestra, their hometown paper has laid out what's in their bankruptcy court documents.

In the aftermath of the Detroit Symphony crisis, Leonard Slatkin says "there's a lot of bridge-building and healing to do."

The brouhaha over Kate & Wills' wedding is winding down, but the furor is just beginning for a formerly unknown 35-year-old Welsh composer whose choral music was picked for the ceremony.

Meanwhile, Alex Ross has assembled a little tongue-in-cheek fanfare mashup of his own for the occasion.

An intended $137 million gift to the Lucerne Festival is now at the center of a massive family feud.

A trio of sad demises this week: Composer Peter Lieberson has died of lymphoma at age 64. Composer Ross Bauer has written a lovely remembrance.

Max Mathews, a pioneer in electronic music, has died at age 84. His work directly inspired HAL's "Daisy Song" in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Biographer Joan Peyser, who penned biographies of Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin and Pierre Boulez, died at age 80.

The band capital of America? Minnesota.

The second installment of the Met's new Ring cycle has premiered, and those planks are apparently still as slippery as all get out.

A retooled Winnie the Opera — about the controversial Mrs. Mandela, sung in Xhosa and English by an all-South African cast — premiered in Johannesburg to a standing ovation on Thursday.

The original version, staged in Toronto in 2007 as The Passion of Winnie with Canadian students trying to sing in Xhosa, was a flop: "tattered, confused and theatrically starved," said The Globe and Mail.

Has Columbia Artists Management been selling an orchestra that doesn't even exist?

Lyric Opera has announced that Anthony Freud will be its new GM. In the Chicago Tribune, John von Rhein ponders how bold Freud's artistic vision might be.

Are you ready for precocious kids in powdered wigs? The Russia K network is hosting its annual Nutcracker International Television Contest for Young Musicians. Judges Yuri Bashmet and Vladmir Spivakov would look sharp in wigs, too.

On the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart, Shadow Mountain Records and Deseret Books — home to Mormon artists exclusively — have another No. 1, this time with a young pianist named Josh Wright. (This marks the sixth No. 1 out of Salt Lake City in the past year.)

There just aren't many artists who name both Percy Grainger and Laura Nyro as top influences. But organist Cameron Carpenter's always one to go his own way.

The most popular piece of classical music in the UK? Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2, according to Classic FM's newest poll.

Madonna is currently collaborating on a classical music-infused score for W.E., a film she's written and directed about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.