For several years during my career at The Seattle Times, I assembled the oddest classical-related stories to appear during a given year and collected them in a giant compendium of musical weirdness. Here are some of the highlights of those columns.

2008

By Melinda Bargreen

Now that 2008 has slipped gently over the horizon, and all of the “Ten Best” lists have hit print, it’s time once again for a list of the year’s notable follies and foibles in the realm of music. A salute, and a crash of the timpani, to the following:

-- Not a great time to fall: In-line skating is terrific fun, but perhaps not when you’ve just been named the new first violinist of the fabled Juilliard String Quartet. Nicholas Eanet, 36, promptly broke his left wrist while skating “in a euphoric state” after telling his good news to his former teacher. The break occurred in October; he’s expected to get well by July 8, when the quartet plays Chicago’s Ravinia Festival.

-- An even worse time to fall: Pity 26-year-old David Garrett, who fell down a flight of stairs after the end of a London concert, and landed on his 290-year-old Stradivarius, the “San Lorenzo.” The badly damaged instrument will cost more than $100,000 to repair – and it may never sound the same.

-- “The Fly” takes a nosedive: Few critics were enthusiastic, but French reviewers were particularly withering about the premiere of the opera “The Fly,” with music by film composer Howard Shore (“Lord of the Rings”). “Le Figaro” reviewer Christian Merlin called the opera “a monotonous mess,” adding that he was "so bored we strongly suspected the parasitic presence of the tsetse fly” (the bloodsucking African insect that causes sleeping sickness).

-- When is music noise? The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra dropped the world premiere of Swedish-Israeli composer Dror Feiler's “Halat Hisar” (State of Siege) from a concert because it was "adverse to the health" of its musicians, according to the orchestra manager. Members of the 100-strong orchestra said they needed to wear headphones while rehearsing the piece, and several reported buzzing in the ears for hours after rehearsals. The 20-minute composition “starts with the rattle of machine-gun fire and gets louder,” according to England’s The Guardian.

-- Extreme noise: In August, a Los Angeles man was accused of killing his neighbor for playing loud music. Reymondo Serrato, 58, a resident of the suburb of Pacoima, reportedly got into a fight with his neighbor over the latter’s music volume levels, finally shooting him.

-- “Not the Messiah”: Humorist Eric Idle (of “Monty Python” fame) redid Handel’s “Messiah” last summer at Wolf Trap (near Washington, D.C.), adding Scottish ballads, Sondheim, doo-wop, John Philip Sousa and lots more. This 21st-century oratorio also included a Bob Dylan imitation, a troupe of bagpipers, three stuffed sheep and a musical leaf-blower. No dead parrot, but three enthusiastic curtain calls.

-- We hope this isn’t part of the bailout: Ford launched a 2008 European advertising campaign featuring an orchestra whose members played 21 instruments made from parts of a Ford Focus, including a “clutch guitar” and a “window harp.” Wonder whether the orchestra gets better mileage.

-- Car as the star: Meanwhile, in Berlin, a new stage show featured two men strolling onstage and destroying an Opel Kadet E with sledgehammers, saws and other implements, while performing “automotive percussion” in bossa nova and other rhythms. There’s also some pre-recorded orchestral music, reportedly (according to the Berliner Zeitung) because no classical-music group has agreed to share a stage with performer Christian von Richthofen and his partner.

-- Dangerous bagpipes: Amateur bagpiper Andrew Aitken faced arrest when he decided to play some traditional Scottish tunes in Beijing on the day of the Olympics opening ceremony. Chinese security forces reportedly thought the bagpipes were a bomb, and moved to arrest Aitken before a nearby tour guide explained the instrument was not usually lethal.

-- Dame Kiri Attacks: Opera diva Dame Kiri te Kanawa had withering words for crossover celebrity singers who rise to stardom in the so-called “popera” vein: “They are all fake singers, they sing with a microphone.” Singling out her fellow New Zealander, the young Hayley Westenra, for criticism, Dame Kiri sniffed: “She’s not in my world. She has never been in it at all.”

-- Heartless: Nearly every year, some long-dead major music personage gets exhumed in the interests of science. Last year it was the turn of Frederic Chopin, who died young in 1849, reportedly of tuberculosis. Some researchers want to test Chopin’s heart, however, to find out whether he really died of cystic fibrosis. The Polish government demurs. The heart, preserved in a jar of cognac, currently rests in a Warsaw church. (The rest of Chopin, by the way, is interred in Paris.)

-- The mouse that roared?  Last April, the New York Metropolitan Opera was cited by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene after a routine restaurant inspection at the Met, where the department found "evidence of mice or live mice present in facility's food and/or nonfood areas." You might want to bring your own snacks along.

-- The Tristan Curse: The Met has had more than its share of problems with its “Tristan und Isolde” production, including many illnesses and substitutions, but the show entered a new disaster level last March – when tenor Gary Lehman slid headfirst down the tilted stage and right into the prompter’s box, where there was an open flame. He was unhurt.

-- Anna Nicole Smith: The Opera. Composer Richard Thomas is hard at work on the libretto for an opera about the late Playboy centerfold and tabloid star, to be premiered in 2010 at London’s Royal Opera House. Thomas, who admitted the subject matter might be considered “trashy,” added that Ms. Smith’s story is “very operatic and sad.” Meanwhile, Opera Magazine accused the company of “having a midlife crisis” in its attempts to play to younger audiences.

-- The case of the missing organ: the Royal Opera House got into a fracas over a missing male organ in its advertisements for a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” when the company used an airbrushed picture of Argentinean actor Juan Pablo Di Pace. The affronted Di Pace complained, according to a spokesman, who observed that, “to Juan’s embarrassment, his penis had been airbrushed out.” The company agreed to stop using the image.

-- And one more for the Royal Opera House, which was clearly on a roll last year: the nude calendar, in which men and women artists and backstage staff stripped to raise money for cancer support. Two members of the orchestra, a harpist and a violinist, posed wearing nothing but their instruments. Also featured: ballet dancers, singers, a stage manager, a costumer, and a pointe ballet shoe mistress, among others. The calendar, which can be purchased with either a male or a female cover photo, sells for 10 pounds, or about $14.43 (http://www.roh.org.uk/merchandise/display.aspx?id=562&showcase=102&category=422).

-- The excitement is building: 2008 heralded the performance of the sixth chord in a projected 639-year performance of the late John Cage’s organ work, “As Slowly As Possible.” This past summer, officials in Halberstadt, Germany, moved the weights holding down the pedals of an organ in the town's medieval church on Saturday, changing to the sixth chord change in Cage's piece. The weights will hold those notes until the next change – which means the sound can be heard in the church all the time. The last chord is expected to be heard in 2640: make those travel plans now!

2004

By Melinda Bargreen

It’s time for. . . The Classical Music  Believe It or Not! And as we wend our way into 2005, may you enjoy the follies of the past year, taken from the world’s legitimate news items, just as much as we’ve enjoyed collecting them for you. Here goes:

-- Arizona Opera offers tickets for blood: a partnership between United Blood Services, Arizona's largest nonprofit community blood supplier, and the Arizona Opera provided a voucher for two Arizona Opera tickets for people who donated blood at designated sites on two days in September. You’ve heard of opera tickets that cost an arm and a leg, but a pint of blood?

-- Music causes lung damage: Researchers have discovered that really loud music isn’t just hard on the ears and the neighbors; it can also collapse a lung. Reporting in the medical journal Thorax, they describe the cases of four young men who suffered a lung collapse -- technically called pneumothorax -- that appeared to be triggered by loud music. Three of the men were at a concert or club when the pneumothorax occurred, while the fourth was in his car, which was outfitted with a 1,000-watt bass box because he ‘liked to listen to loud music,’” the report said.

So what is a pneumothorax? A small rupture in a lung allows air to leak into the space between the lungs and the chest wall, causing the lung to collapse. Symptoms include breathlessness and chest pain on the affected side. In severe cases, doctors must insert a chest tube to allow the air to escape the chest cavity.

-- Bare butt in Brazil: In Brazil, a theater director who moons an audience is just performing “an exercise in freedom of expression.” That’s what happened when director Gerald Thomas pulled down his pants before the booing audience after a Rio de Janeiro performance of “Tristan und Isolde.” In August, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that Thomas’ behavior was not obscene – though it might give a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Full moon over Rio.”

-- Going bananas: Musicians at the Music@Menlo chamber music festival are among those wolfing down the bananas backstage. And why? Bananas contain trytophan, a protein the body converts to the relaxant serotonin, and thus they are believed to act a little like the beta-blocker Inderal – a very common drug used among musicians to combat stage fright.

-- And speaking of bananas: Rowdy chimps at Honolulu Zoo stopped attacking each other when tapes featuring lullabies and heartbeat sounds were played outside their cages. The same tapes, used in 8,000 special-care baby wards in the U.S., enabled infants to leave on average 12 days earlier than before the music was introduced. That’s not all; BBC World Service reports that when a supermarket owner in Leicester, England started playing French accordion tunes and German "oompah" songs, wine sales from both countries shot up. See, you knew accordions were good for something.

-- Cage gets the last laugh: Ever been in one of those avant-garde music performances that you thought would never end? You could be in an abandoned church in the German town of Halberstadt, where last July the world's longest concert moved two notes closer to its end: Three years down, 636 to go. A specially built organ, with three of its keys held down by weights, has been playing three notes since February of 2003 in a work by the late John Cage called “Organ2/ASLSP” (or “Organ Squared/As Slow As Possible”). In July, two more notes were added. The concert began Sept. 5, 2001 — the day Cage would have turned 89. The composition starts with a silence, and the only sound for a first 1½ years was air. The first notes were played in February 2003. The next change arrives in March 2006, when two notes will be taken away. Don’t believe us? Check it out at www.john-cage.halberstadt.de.

-- Bring on the porkers: Live pigs were auditioned at Germany’s Krefeld-Mönchengladbach Theater as potential extras for a new production of Flotow’s 19th-century comic opera “Martha.” Director Bernd Motti assured all the aspiring porkers: “No prior operatic stage experience is necessary.”

-- What a year it’s been for poor Mozart! He has been dead since 1791, but no one is letting the composer (or his relatives) rest in peace.

First we have a Berlin production of his opera “The Abduction from the Seraglio” set in a brothel, featuring prostitutes, full-frontal nudity, drugs and sadistic violence. “When the prostitutes were massacred on stage I had to leave,” said a representative of Komische Oper Berlin sponsor DaimlerChrysler. The opera company, however has reported “strong turnouts.”

Then, a British TV documentary (“What Made Mozart Tic?”) suggested that Mozart’s works were influenced by the obsessive-compulsive disorder Tourette's syndrome, which can cause uncontrollable swearing or twitching. The evidence, according to British composer James McConnel (who has Tourette’s), lies in Mozart’s bawdy letters and song titles, some of which were “absolutely disgusting.”

Meanwhile, scientists have exhumed the bodies of some of Mozart’s relatives interred in St. Sebastian's Cemetery in Salzburg – his father, Leopold; his maternal grandmother; and Jeanette, the 16-year-old daughter of his sister Nannerl. And why?  To determine whether DNA evidence supports the contention that a skull currently held at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg is indeed that of the composer.

And finally, a fingerprint was found on a letter dating to the mid-1700s that appeared to have been written by Leopold Mozart, Mozart’s composer father. Apparently the print was accidental, likely made when the writer got ink on his finger. “One doesn't find a fingerprint from Leopold Mozart every day,” said Erich Marx, director of Salzburg's Carolino Augusteum museum, in a masterpiece of understatement.

-- Donald Rumsfeld set to music: The sometimes cryptic utterances of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld have inspired San Francisco musicians to set his words to chamber music. Among the top hits: “The Unknown,” a song which includes the following lyrics:

“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns.”

These words, and plenty more, are sung by soprano Elender Wall, with pianist/composer Bryant Kong. We know you’ll want to get this self-published CD. Try http://www.stuffedpenguin.com/.

-- Maria Callas was poisoned? Noted film director Franco Zeffirelli, who knew the late diva prior to her death in Paris 27 years ago at age 53, now has made a film of her last days called “Callas Forever.” He suggests that Callas didn’t die of a heart attack, but rather was poisoned by a pianist, Vasso Devetzi (who has since died), who wanted to inherit her £5 million fortune ($9.7 million).

“Devetzi was giving Maria sleeping pills and amphetamines the whole time. It is legitimate to think that Devetzi killed Maria and then stole everything she had,” Zeffirelli told one interviewer.

“Why else would Devetzi have her body cremated immediately after the funeral service? Maria hated the idea of being cremated. Was it because Devetzi was covering her tracks?”

-- Is Disney Hall too darned hot? The mirror-like steel walls of Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, may be partially sandblasted in order to reduce glare that has reportedly increased summertime heat in nearby buildings – and temporarily blinded passing motorists.

-- Those unruly conductors: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra music director Daniele Gatti, on tour in Naples, Florida, shocked his audience last February when he interrupted his standing-ovation curtain calls to deliver a diatribe instead of an encore. According to one listener, Gatti’s tirade could be translated as: “The acoustics suck. The stage sucks. The placement of his orchestra on stage sucked.”

The Naples Daily News riposted by calling him a “pretentious, angry little twit.”

-- Don’t call me darling: The politically correct English National Opera issued an edict advising staff against using typically theatrical terms of address such as “darling,” because this “may constitute sexual harassment.”

An ENO spokesman explained, “Whilst it may be acceptable between friends, it would be thought of very differently if the term is used by a senior colleague and accompanied by a wink.” Heaven forfend, darling.

-- Swedish researchers build cardboard piano: And it sounds pretty good, apparently. The piano uses integrated circuits pressed onto paper, rather than circuit boards or silicon chips. The piano has all 88 keys; pressing one sends a signal to an external loudspeaker, which plays the correct sound.

-- And finally, some really good news: The French government's industry minister has approved a decision to let cinemas, concert halls and theaters install cell phone jammers -- on condition that emergency calls can still get through. Finally, a jam session welcome by classical-music fans. Let’s get those jammers into our concert halls without delay!

2005

Odd birds and strange goings-on in classical music world, 2005

By Melinda Bargreen

Classical music has a rather staid reputation in some circles, but a look at the worldwide news items from the past year suggests the "longhairs" are just as crazy as everyone else. Once again, it's time for ... Melinda's Believe It or Not, an assemblage of real music news from the past 12 months. As you read on, you will find ample proof that truth is indeed stranger than fiction — even on the classical side.

Pavarotti Plans Three Tenors Reunion: Despite repeated "retirements," superannuated supertenor Luciano Pavarotti hasn't really retired yet. Before he does, he plans to have "one or two" reunions with the two other Three Tenors (Plácido Domingo and José Carreras), possibly even this summer in conjunction with the Football World Cup, the sporting event that first spawned the trio in 1990. The 70-year-old singer (who had to be assisted onto the stage to make the above announcement) says he's going to tour for "a year or two" more before stepping down to spend more time with his 2-year-old daughter.

"Nancy and Tonya: The Opera": Darned if the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding figure-skating scandal isn't destined for an opera house near you. (Not too near, we hope.) The 11-year-old story, in which Harding's henchman clobbered the more successful Kerrigan in the knee before the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, is the basis for a libretto by Elizabeth Searle. Tufts University grad student Abigail Al Dorry is writing the music, and the opera will be performed at Tufts next spring. Stay tuned.

Ulysses S. Grant: The Opera: Washington National Opera's training program has commissioned a new opera by composer Scott Wheeler about Ulysses S. Grant ("Democracy: An American Comedy"), and it opens with President Grant and his wife Julia in the White House celebrating their 25th anniversary. Frankly, Nancy and Tonya are starting to sound pretty good.

"Jerry Springer: The Opera": The BBC received 40,000 complaints before it even began the broadcast of "Jerry Springer: The Opera" last January, after church groups requested that the musical not be aired. Based on Springer's talk show, the work features such titles as "Pregnant by a Transsexual" and "Here Come the Hookers," plus a hefty barrage of a reported 8,000 expletives. The most controversial scene reportedly has Jesus wearing a diaper and declaring he's "a bit gay."

Moammar Gaddafi: The Rap Opera: The English National Opera announced that it will open its 2006-07 season with a new opera about the Libyan dictator by the dance/hip-hop collective Asian Dub Foundation, with a rapper playing Gaddafi and an all-female chorus of bodyguards. The mind boggles. And also at the English National ...

Brünnhilde Was a Suicide Bomber: Controversy ruled this year at the English National Opera's "Ring," where the staging of Wagner's four-opera masterpiece included scenes of pole dancing, gang rape and multiple stabbings. The culminating coup was at the end of the fourth opera, when Brünnhilde straps explosives to her body and detonates herself (a scene described as "utterly crass" in The Guardian).

There's Cocaine in My Opera Set: We knew "La Traviata" has a big party scene, but who would have figured that British customs agents would find 11 kilos of cocaine hidden in the sets and costumes of Opera Ireland's production of that opera? The production was being trucked from Germany to Dublin when the white stuff was discovered.

Let's Re-Bury Rachmaninoff: Folks just can't let those composers rest in piece. Last year, it was Mozart's relatives who were being exhumed for DNA testing. This year, Oscar-winning Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov called for the return of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff's remains (1873-1943) from the U.S. for burial in Russia. Rachmaninoff, who fled the Russian Revolution in 1917, is buried — for now — in Valhalla, N.Y.

Tough Year for Mozart: On the eve of the composer's 250th birth anniversary in 2006, thieves and vandals have been unusually active. A life-size wax head of Mozart worth $18,400 was stolen from a Salzburg museum, and in the same city, a statue of Mozart was defaced by one Martin Humer, 60, who admitted tossing paint and feathers at the statue last August.

You Don't Want to Lip-Sync in Turkmenistan: The president of Turkmenistan since 1985, Saparmurat Niyazov, banned lip-syncing in his country because of its "negative effect on the development of singing and musical art." (Ashlee Simpson, beware.) The ban extends to TV, concerts and private parties. Niyazov earlier banned opera and ballet because they did not "correspond with the national mentality."

Rocker Patti Smith Covers Wagnerian Opera: Acting as a journalist, Smith went to the Wagnerian holy city of Bayreuth to review "Tannhäuser" and "Parsifal" for the German publication "Die Zeit." Among her findings: "It's very exciting and interesting," and "The Bratwurst sausages are excellent."

Let's Hire the Whole Orchestra: As a romantic gesture, this is one of the more expensive possibilities. English businessman John Barker hired London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a private Royal Festival Hall concert honoring girlfriend Heather Axelson, featuring her favorite work: the Janacek Sinfonietta. It cost 100,000 pounds (about $175,000). Her comment: "John is the most romantic man alive."

The Papal Piano Gets Stuck: The new Pope Benedict XVI, a piano fan, was temporarily frustrated when piano movers couldn't get his instrument through the windows of his papal apartment. According to the German magazine "Der Spiegel," the new pope uses the piano to relax in times of stress, and sometimes irked his previous neighbors by playing Mozart, Bach and Palestrina too loudly.

Calendar Girls at the Symphony: Eighteen women of the Canton (Ohio) Symphony (including staff, board members and supporters) have posed for an 18-month "provocative calendar" designed to change the minds of those who "think the Canton Symphony is stuffy." We wouldn't dream of thinking that, especially after viewing their Web site (www.cantonsymphony.org/morethanyouexpect.htm). The calendar is yours for a $15 donation.

Composer Eats Swan, Gets into Trouble: The well-known English composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who discovered an electrocuted whooper swan near his home in the Orkney Islands, informed the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds — and then ate the swan. He declared that the leg meat "made a delicious terrine." The Society was not amused.

Ice Orchestra Melts Away: A Stockholm concert by an orchestra of instruments made entirely from ice — including clarinets, guitars, trumpets and cellos carved by New Mexico artist Tim Linhart — was abruptly canceled when Linhart decided the student musicians weren't doing a good enough job playing his instruments. Guests in the 100-seat igloo concert hall gave Linhart the cold shoulder for insulting the musicians.

The Prowler Played Beethoven: New Riegel, Ohio's police chief, one Steve Swartzmiller, was awakened in the middle of the night last February by a man playing Beethoven on his piano. It was 19-year-old Shawn Chadwell, who was drunk and wandered into the wrong house by accident. Swartzmiller charged him with underage drinking and burglary, but added that he "played perfect Beethoven."

2007

By Melinda Bargreen

You’ve always heard that truth is stranger than fiction. Believe it! Over the 12 months of 2007, we’ve gathered plenty of evidence to prove that whenever its musicians aren’t producing sublime music, the classical world can behave just as badly, and as oddly, as anyone else. Here are just a few stories to prove it.

The Oboist is a Bookie: A federal judge sentenced Washington, D.C., classical oboist H. David Meyers last March to a year and a day in prison for money laundering and running an illegal sports-betting operation. It was up to prison authorities to decide whether the 61-year-old can play and practice in the slammer.

French horn bearing arms: New Zealand French horn player Bernard Shapiro (not the Seattle Symphony’s former principal oboist of the same name!) was charged last March with possessing a cache of “military-style” explosives. He is also a hunting guide and has been known for “solo tramps around the South Island dressed in 19th-century attire.”

Pop goes the Pops: Last May, a balcony brawl that stopped the show on opening night of the Boston Pops began with a tap on the shoulder. One of the combatants tapped a persistent talker on the shoulder a few times before turning to an usher for help. The talker stood up, punched the tapper, and pulled him to the ground by the hair.

Rudeness among the Really Terrible Orchestras: The Edinburgh-based Really Terrible Orchestra (whose membership includes author Alexander McCall Smith) was shocked to learn that a church choirmaster down south planned to steal their name to set up another band of musical misfits. The first hint of disharmony came in an email from Dave Phippen, a Cornish choirmaster: “We're going to do it no matter what you think. We presume there is no copyright to the Really Terrible Orchestra name. Should this not be the case, we don't give a !!!!” Tsk, tsk.

Really Terrible P.S.: The original Really Terrible Orchestra made its London debut in November at Cadogan Hall, normally the home of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with McCall Smith serving as host and “extremely incompetent” contrabassoonist. Naturally the concert sold out.

The Bum-Wiggling Conductor: Edmonton Symphony Orchestra music director William Eddins attracted the ire of a patron who disliked his podium antics. In a letter to the Edmonton Journal, anti-wiggler Jeanie Campbell wrote, “He shakes his body, wiggles his bum, kicks his legs out, a chain hanging off his back pocket.” The unrepentant Eddins replied that “my ‘wiggling bum’ was the first thing that my lovely wife claims she ever noticed about me, so I fear it shall remain.” 

Sex and Violins: Muso Magazine, self-described is “the groundbreaking magazine for the younger, more open-minded generation of classical music fans,” has released the results of a survey into the sex lives of musicians, with some startling results: Violists are “most likely to have sex on a first date,” “most likely to have had sex three or more times in the last week” and “most likely to have had 10 or more sexual partners.” Tuba players, on the other hand, not only played “the least sexy instrument” but were also “most likely to be single.”

Dangerous Times at the Dubrovnik Symphony: A member of the Dubrovnik city council broke into a concert by the city's symphony orchestra, threatened the guest conductor, and attacked the orchestra’s manager, Pero Sisa, 51, when Sisa tried to stop the man and his two accomplices.

“I have a concussion, contusion of nose and gums, and I am as blue as the sea,” Sisa told the press. “First he strangled me for a while, but since I am big, he was not successful, so he head-butted me and I passed out.”

The Vegetable Orchestra: The 11-member First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, an ensemble that gets its instruments from farmers’ markets, returned to Great Britain last month, performing on instruments — carrot flute, pepper trumpet, leek violin, pumpkin drum, celery-root bongos — which they make anew before each concert. (Organic produce is preferred.)

Mozart Makes You Fatter? Well, if you’re a pig.Vietnamese pig farmer Nguyen Chi Cong, 44, says he has boosted productivity by exposing his 3,000 hogs to the melodies of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert while they have their snouts in the trough. He began playing recordings of classical symphonies and sonatas over loudspeakers six years ago for the benefit of his workers, only to find the music also had a soothing effect on the pigs.

“I saw that my pigs started eating more and that they were gaining weight faster than usual,” said Cong, who told a reporter that he now serenades his animals with the tunes of the great European composers daily from 7-11 a.m. and 2-4 p.m.

The Wonderful World of Opera: This was the year that brought a Genoa “Julius Caesar” production with an added role, a guy strolling around in a crocodile suit “representing the timeless spirit of Egypt,” and a production we wish we’d seen: Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger,” staged by his great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner with (as described in the German press) “Richard Wagner dancing in his underwear and a bunch of master singers horsing around the stage with oversized penises.” They have all the fun in Bayreuth.

No Panty-Throwing for Dame Kiri: The celebrated operatic soprano Dame Kiri te Kanawa prevailed in a lawsuit against her by a concert promoter when she withdrew from shows with Australian pop-star singer John Farnham. After viewing videos of Farnham performances, the diva was alarmed: “I was concerned about the knickers or underpants and underwear apparel being thrown at him and him collecting it and obviously holding it in his hands as some sort of trophy,” she told the court. “How could I, in my classical form, perform in this way?”

When in Doubt, Sue: It’s been a litigious year, with a Canadian-based conductor (Douglas Sanford) suing his musicians (in the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra) for defamation, and a British composer (Keith Burstein) suing a critic (Veronica Lee in The London Evening Standard) over an unfavorable review of his opera, “Manifest Destiny.” Also this year came news of a European Union directive on noise abatement, which might inspire lawsuits by limiting the “noise” produced by an orchestra to 85 decibels: “How could you apply it to Gustav Mahler, for instance, or Richard Strauss?” asked Libor Pesek, conductor of the Prague Symphony.

Truth Really is Stranger than Fiction: The Kazakhstan Orchestra has invited “Borat” movie star Sacha Baron Cohen’s composer brother, Erran Cohen, to compose a symphony. Despite the wildly unfavorable picture of Kazakhstan in the movie, and the resulting dismay among Kazakhs, it seems they really liked the movie’s film score – which Erran Cohen composed. Watch for the new work, called “Zere” (in honor of sponsorship from Kazakhstan’s Zere Corporation).

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