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Opera companies producing Broadway musicals. Broadway taking on opera classics. What’s going on? “There are two main reasons for this sudden fusion, neither of which originate in artistic concerns.”

So what difference does the discovery last month of a new manuscript of Mahler’s First Symphony make? “It changes not the substance of the symphony but its sound: its orchestration and how, by means of stress and rhythmic detail, its ideas are articulated — how, in a word, it speaks.”

Er, yes…but if you’re a Latin music artist and want to get airplay on the radio, you’ve got to pay. “Because payola adds so much to the cost of promoting a recording – between 20 percent and 30 percent, according to former major-label employees – it cuts out most smaller, independent labels, typical sources for new genres and artists.”

In recent years concert ticket prices have spiraled up. But in the past six months the concert industry has discovered consumer resistance to the high cost, and finally, prices are staring to decline. One promoter predicts ticket prices will be down 15 percent from last year.

For the first time in 224 years, La Scala opened its season outside of its own theatre. “The newly built, 2,400-seat Arcimboldi, in a former industrial area, will host La Scala’s full program of operas, ballets and concerts through December 2004 while La Scala Theater, the company’s venerable temple of bel canto, undergoes a $56 million renovation.”

Last week the Chicago Tribune published a damning series of criticisms about the acoustics in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. This week, the orchestra’s president responds to music critic John von Rhein’s complaints. “What confused us was not so much that Mr. von Rhein reversed the opinion that he had stated at the opening of the refurbished Orchestra Hall in 1997 – that the renovation brought “marked improvement” in the area of sound – but that he reversed views that he has been expressing consistently since.