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The Boston Symphony is playing an all-Schoenberg program this week. “The Schoenberg programming has had a polarizing effect, pitting the traditionalists, who would prefer their Beethoven served with a dose of Mozart, against the modernists, a group made up of musicians, students, critics, and subscribers who say they’re inspired by Levine’s commitment to a composer who, while long respected, has never been a hot ticket.”

One day in 1967, David Margetts’ Stradivarius was stolen from his car. Some time late a woman found it on the side of a freeway in Los Angeles. It took 27 years before the instrument surfaced again…

It’s been five years since the Chicago Symphony lost its regular series of radio broadcasts, and a replacement series is nowhere on the horizon. Wynne Delacoma says that the continued lack of any radio presence is directly attributable to stubbornness on the part of the CSO’s musicians and management, who have been loathe to challenge old compensation systems, even as other orchestras embrace new ideas. “Audiences in Chicago and around the world need to hear what the symphony is doing now, not simply what it did 10 or 20 or 30 years ago… It is a crime that [the CSO] is falling so far behind in the world of electronic media.”

The Chicago Symphony’s music director search is now two years old, and no progress has been visible in the quest to find a proper successor for Daniel Barenboim, who leaves the position in June. But no one in the organization seems to be in any sort of hurry, and if there seems to be a dearth of well-qualified candidates, the CSO isn’t bothered by it. Some are even suggesting that a music director isn’t terribly important to the fortunes of a truly great orchestra. “The CSO’s 2006-07 season, with trips to Carnegie Hall under Boulez and a residency in Florida next February, hardly signals an orchestra on hold.”

Conventional wisdom says that the opera crowd is too mired in tradition to embrace new work, but several Canadian companies are enlisting big-name stars and media partners in an effort to ramp up public interest in a new wave of premieres. One of the city’s artistic directors says that opera “has become a populist voice and an opportunity for creative artists to show society to itself.”

Cleveland’s two opera companies are on the verge of combining operations while maintaining their separate missions. “Like many American opera companies, Cleveland Opera and Lyric Opera Cleveland have struggled in recent seasons with deficits and declining attendance. The two organizations view a merger, no matter how challenging, as a means of controlling finances and presenting a reasonable number of performances of varied repertoire.”

There may be no more conservative institution in American classical music than New York’s Metropolitan Opera. For decades, the Met has catered to an audience that loves old chestnuts, respects tradition above all else, and generally abhors the experimental. So when the company’s incoming general manager starts talking about wholesale change and using terms like “radical reinvention,” a lot of people get very nervous. But Peter Gelb is apparently quite serious in his desire to remake the Met for the 21st century.