THE voices of the New World return to the old in this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. A flamboyant, colourful, thunderous line-up focused on Latin America and the United States ranges from the Grammy award-winning gospel group the Blind Boys of Alabama, to Australian opera, Brazilian dance and some of the world’s greatest orchestras.

Lucy CroweThere seems to be something of a curse blighting London’s tenors at the moment; hot on the heels of Domingo’s withdrawal from Tamerlano we had both John Tessier and his understudy unable to perform in ENO’s Elixir (resulting in a polyglot performance, with guest tenor Edgaras Montvidas singing in Italian while the rest of the cast continued in English), and last night’s Handel Festival concert continued in this vein with tenor Simon Wall unable to perform.

The Metropolitan Opera under general manager Peter Gelb is defining itself through the choice and quality, however debatable, of its ambitious new productions. Yet bringing successful existing productions of overlooked works to the Met is just as important to the company’s artistic mission, not to mention a safer bet. And few operas have been as overlooked as Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet.”

When persistent bronchitis forced Anne Schwanewilms to withdraw from the cast of Lyric Opera’s fine revival of “The Marriage of Figaro,” the company again turned to one of its own to help keep the show afloat. Replacing her for the remaining five performances of Mozart’s comedy is American soprano Nicole Cabell, who took over the role of Countess Almaviva on Monday, little more than a month after she portrayed Adina in the company’s “Elixir of Love.”

The operatic concert paraphrase is one of the most time-bound of musical genres. It’s almost exclusively an artifact of the 19th century, an era when keyboard wizards were rife, operas were popular blockbusters, and home stereos didn’t exist.

Taking on Rameau’s only comic work Platée in France is like trying to remake a famous film. Laurent Pelly’s staging for the Paris Opera in 1999, which is still in repertoire and also a DVD, has rightly or wrongly become a template.

The story of Franz Schreker flips classical music’s greatest cliché on its head. Instead of toiling in obscurity during his life and gaining fame only after death, the Austrian was a star as a young composer—before he was all but erased from history. In 1919, the influential critic Paul Bekker wrote that Schreker was the only operatic author with a claim to Wagner’s exalted legacy.

Das Rheingold has been a long wait. The Paris Opera has not seen a full Ring cycle since 1957. Now, Nicolas Joel has embarked on a new cycle over two seasons with a first, very mixed, result.

Today on ArtsBeat three New York Times critics — Anthony Tommasini, chief classical music critic; Roberta Smith, art critic; and Dwight Garner, book critic — are discussing the music, the art and the literary threads of “The Nose.” Daniel J. Wakin, classical music reporter for The Times, is moderating.You can read the previous posts here.

There’s no denying La Bohème is one of the world’s most famous operas. Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera is staged frequently across the globe and was the inspiration for the Tony-winning musical Rent, which ran for more than 12 years on Broadway and was just staged in an acclaimed Minneapolis production. One could argue it’s the love story at the center of the piece that’s contributed the most to the opera’s lasting resonance. And on that level, if not on all levels, the current Minnesota Opera production delivers.

Philip Langridge, an English tenor who was renowned for roles by Benjamin Britten and was an eloquent interpreter of Handel, Mozart, Schubert, Janacek and Stravinsky, died in England on Friday. He was 70 and lived near Guildford, southwest of London.

The good news first: having lost the indisposed Plácido Domingo for the entire run, the Royal Opera found a passable replacement for the role of Bajazet, the imprisoned king in Handel’s most serious opera.

She was learned and sexually liberated, a product of the 18th century but a role model for our time - “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”, according to Voltaire, her sometime lover. History has tended to place Emilie du Châtelet (1706-49) in Voltaire’s shadow, but she stole the limelight at Monday’s premiere of a new opera by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.

Peter Alward, the former head of EMI Group Ltd.’s classical music division, will take over the scandal-ridden Salzburg Easter Festival as soon as next week, the Austrian weekly magazine News reported.

If you sit back and simply take in the “heavenly frivolities” of Mozart’s masterpiece, “The Marriage of Figaro,” with its rapid fire array of eminently memorable melodies, you might well miss the undercurrent of sexual tension and class resentment between nobles and those who serve them.

Come in all dirty men in macs from Geneva and neighbouring cantons. Olivier Py’s new Lulu comes with a health warning that the film used in the staging might shock sensitive souls; children under 16 are advised to stay away.

If all had gone as originally planned, the offering at the Met on Thursday would have been Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But, facing economic exigencies, Peter Gelb decided to put on Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. It may not be a sure-fire box office attraction, but it apparently costs less to restage and certainly seems less forbidding to conservative New Yorkers.

So, once more we plunge into that melodramatic cauldron, that brooding nonsense, that is Lucia di Lammermoor. On its first outing in 2008 David Alden’s grimly stylised, psychopathological take on the opera that Donizetti squeezed from a capacious Sir Walter Scott novel gathered assorted praise. This time round, the director’s shock treatment of life in Lucia’s Scottish manse — think Grand Guignol reimagined by Ibsen — shocks and impresses rather less.

The junk hauler figured they had to be worth something, these 15,000 black discs that filled an entire room in a Silver Spring house.

Every enlightened artistic community needs an organisation like Ensemble Parallèle, pledged to staging significant 20th-century operas in relatively intimate spaces. Considering that the San Francisco Opera has not produced Berg’s still shattering expressionist masterpiece in a decade - and is not likely to under the current management - Nicole Paiement’s valiant band struck a blow last weekend for intelligent music theatre in which dedication triumphs over dollars.