Welcome to In Tune, your weekly classical news feed on CBC Radio 2. Saturdays at noon, Katherine Duncan shares the classical music and musicians people are listening to and talking about, here in Canada and around the world. Here are the stories she's covering this week.
We'll celebrate the 305th anniversary of the death of Joseph Haydn, who was so admired as a genius that scientists stole his head from his grave to study his cranium to see if Haydn's musical ability had anything to do with the size and shape of his skull. Results were inconclusive, and the scientific basis of the study, phrenology, has since been discredited.
If you took piano lessons growing up and wish you could go back to it, you're the target market for the Re-Introduction Etudes, a new book and CD by Canadian pianist, pop musician and teacher Chilly Gonzales.
A Stradivarius violin once owned by Rodolphe Kreutzer has been discovered among the possessions of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark. Now it's going up for auction and could sell for as much as $10 million.
While a violin can cost millions, you're already the owner of a perfectly good musical instrument: your voice. Now a new festival in Toronto, the Sing! Toronto Vocal Arts Festival celebrates that.
Violinist and Olympic skier Vanessa Mae has agreed to join a working group of the International Olympic Committee to help steer the future of the Olympics.
Airline Icarus, an opera set during a plane crash, opens this week in Toronto. Soundstreams is producing the new work by composer Brian Current and librettist Anton Piatagorsky.
American baritone Thomas Hampson believes you can learn a lot about the world, by studying classical art song. Now he's asking for your help to make a 13-part radio series called Song: Mirror of the World.
Opera on the Avalon has commissioned composer John Estacio to write the first opera ever set entirely in Atlantic Canada. Ours will tell the story of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, which was decimated at Beaumont Hamel in 1916.