Two weeks ago we ran this letter in the Weekend feedback:

Thanks for the criticism

Thank you, Post-Gazette, for sending a reviewer to our concert this past weekend ("Music Review: Camerata skillfully follows literary trail," April 21). I enjoyed meeting Burkhardt Reiter, and obviously I was very pleased with what he wrote. I believe in giving credit where credit is due, however belatedly, and I wanted to thank Andrew Druckenbrod for his part in the current artistic success of The Pittsburgh Camerata.

When he first joined the staff of the Post-Gazette in 1999, he reviewed our Christmas concert. Let's just say that he was disappointed in us and didn't pull any punches.

Naturally, I didn't enjoy getting such a review, and I wanted to think that his remarks were not justified. As it happened, though, that particular performance was recorded.

Thus does technology make fools of us all.

At any rate, it gave me a great deal to think about, and in the ensuing years I have modified certain aspects of my direction. As a result I am more able to help the singers to live up to their potential as individuals and as a group.

I expect that being a reviewer is a thankless task, and the position can certainly be abused. But thoughtful, informed reviews can provide useful feedback and information for the organizations being reviewed.

This provides an extremely valuable service to the arts community. So thanks to the Post-Gazette for continuing to review classical music when I'm sure there is tremendous pressure to use the space for more lucrative and/or popular content, and thank you for doing your job with integrity.

Rebecca Rollett

Artistic director, The Pittsburgh Camerata

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I was floored by this letter. A critic gets a comment like this only once or twice in a career. Someone telling me that, years later, she realizes I was right with a criticism and that I actually helped improve her group? Practically unheard of!

But I also was really touched by the letter. Indeed, Rebecca's willingness to fight instinctive defensiveness to take a hard look at what she was doing with her choir is rare in this biz. And to her credit her changes (and, of course, her natural growth as a conductor) have helped the Camerata vastly improve in the years following my first review.

Critics differ as much as people do, but I think the best ones write with a mind to educate and enable readers, on the one hand, and to improve performance quality and repertoire, on the other -- all with tactful and respectful writing. I am certainly imperfect at this, but it's a goal and I think it showed in our coverage of the Camerata, a chamber choir here in town.

While it is true I didn't "pull any punches" in the original review, I did include some bona fide positives to comment on. My goal then and now is not to crush groups or show how much I know, but to describe events truthfully (as I hear them) in a collegial style. These are, after all, concert reviews and not crime reporting. And for the record, I didn't revel in writing such a negative review, I actually hate when I feel I must.

In the years that followed, I let my freelancers review the Camerata to get some other voices into the discussion so I wouldn't just be hammering the singers. And in later reviews such as this one, I kept an open mind, which paid off, again, because the choir improved over the years.

It may have looked like Rebecca was buttering me up for future good reviews, but that was nowhere near the truth. She was simply divulging something that many directors would never have the guts to admit, if they would ever do it at all: that they learned from public criticism. I applaud her for that. In a perfect world, we would all not only learn from each other, but want to.

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The Pittsburgh Flute Club got international last week. It hosted its first Young Artist Competition, an event it intends to operate annually for flutists under 25. On April 26 at the Flute Academy, eight flutists from around the globe competed, with participants from Korea, Norway, Sweden and the United States. The winners:

First place ($1,000) -- Brit Halvorsen of Norway (studying at Carnegie Mellon University with Jeanne Baxtresser and Alberto Almarza).

Second place ($300) -- Heather Zinninger (studying at Eastman School of music and a student of Bonita Boyd).

Third place ($200) -- Erin McKibben (studying at the University of Michigan with Amy Porter).

Judges were Bernard Goldberg, Stacey Steele Semifinal round: Francesca Arnone, Jennifer Conner, Kathryn Umble, Alison Brown Sincoff, Damian Bursill-Hall and Rhian Kenny

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The Pittsburgh Opera is almost done with its move from its Downtown offices to its new, huge complex in the Strip District. Our intrepid videographer, Michael Henninger, shot a short video last week, if you want to get a sense of the enormity of the transfer. With many costumes, scores, computers, files and sets, this is not your standard house move.

I toured the spectacular-looking brick warehouse a few weeks ago and I truly think it has the chance to transform the company. The roughly 40,000 square foot building is really two separate long buildings adjoined. The space will allow for more rehearsals (because it won't be sharing the Benedum Center rehearsal space with other groups and because there will be two large rehearsal halls) and will reduce logistical problems since everyone and everything will be in the same space. There is a extensive second-floor space with everyone's cubicals and offices (very stylish, I might add, from an earlier renovation -- a sort of urban/rough-hewn look highlighted by a meeting room with at garage door!). It should help the organization financially, too, since the Pittsburgh Opera will own the building and not have to rent it or rehearsal space (it plans on raising $8 million to cover the sale, the renovation and maintenance of the building).

When I wrote for the Star Tribune of the Twin Cities in the 1990s, the Minnesota Opera had just moved into a massive space in the Minneapolis warehouse district which helped that regional company grow (even in fundraising since it could hold parties there). The Minnesota Opera eventually built sets there and while the Pittsburgh Opera isn't yet planning that yet, I would imagine it will be in its future.

In any case, there is something to be said for that horrid word that gets bounced around still, "synergy." If ever there is reason to apply it, it is in a case like this new building, in which efficiency will likely lead to even better artistry for the Pittsburgh Opera.

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After Pittsburgh Opera music director Antony Walker's amazing singing from the pit while conducting, other stories about opera will pale this season. But the industry is abuzz with the encore of "Ah! Mes Amis" that Juan Diego Florez gave in his performance of Donizetti's "Fille du Regiment (The Daughter of the Regiment)" this week at the Met in New York.

The reason it's a big deal is that most opera houses, including Pittsburgh Opera, don't allow encores, especially in the middle of an act. Florez's was reportedly pre-arranged and authorized by the Met, in part to show off his fantastic voice that can hit the aria's nine high Cs with grace and ease (Florez is a singular talent, a light-voiced, high tenor that you don't hear that often) and probably to create a little news, too. I asked the Pittsburgh Opera's artistic director Christopher Hahn about it.

"I don't have an official policy about encores because the assumption has been for the longest time that they don't happen," he says. "It is only in the very rarest of occasions that they happen. They clearly interrupt the drama and the flow."

While in Donizetti's time, it was a common practice, "for most of the last century it has been frowned upon," says Hahn. "Now, it is so not part of the practice that no singer could just decide spur of the moment to give an encore because the conductor would not know what [the singer] is doing. It would have to be discussed earlier. But back then, the conductor would whisper to the orchestra and make eye contact with the singer and do it again."

He doesn't have a big problem with Florez and the Met, though. "The Daughter of the Regiment" is a comedy and it is so clearly a show piece aria it is difficult to argue it disturbs the flow of the opera."

I agree with him. In comedies it would be nice to see more of this. The idea that most comic operas should maintain a theatrical flow akin to film is a strange one. While productions of tragic operas have truly gained from the influence of theater and film, comedies have lost some of their original sass and just fun, I think. Occasionally pulling the curtain back and revealing the artifice of the production can be liberating and lighthearted (certainly it is seen in theater from time to time), not to mention historically accurate, so why not? At the end of the day, it is singers we go to hear and hearing great ones sing an aria more than once would be welcome, in moderation.

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Each year, the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Society takes a closer look at a theme from one of the Pittsburgh Opera's productions. This year it will take inspiration from Bellini's "Capulets & Montagues," looking at how conflict and lack of nurturing in families can lead to violence, with particular focus on gangs. The title of the seminar is "Generations at War: Losing Children to Revenge."

Dr. Eleanor Irwin will present a seminar titled "Unresolved Trauma and Family Tragedy: a Psychoanalytic Perspective." Then Dawn Lehman of the Center for Victims of Violence and Crime will examine "methods for creating different outcomes for the conflicts seen in the story." Not that they want to see a happy ending (which is what Prokofiev tried to do when he wrote his ballet "Romeo & Juliet," by the way). Beth Parker, the Opera Lady, and Opera artistic director Christopher Hahn will give a lecture: "A Patriarchal Society at War: The Capulets & the Montagues in Thor Steingraber's Production."

The event takes place from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. (registration begins at 1 p.m.) Saturday, May 3, in rehearsal room B in the Benedum Center, Downtown. Enter through the stage door at 719 Liberty Ave.

Tickets are complicated enough for me to just give the entire list:

Opera Ticket and Seminar (CME available for Mental Health Professionals): $140

Opera Subscribers: $65

General Public - Opera Ticket and Seminar, No CME $105

General Public - Seminar Only $65

Students with Ticket: $30

Students, Seminar Only: $15.

Call 412-661-4224 or 412-281-3480.

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The Allegheny Chapter of the American Musicological Society must be one of the more active chapters in the country. Its annual meeting tends to have many intriguing papers on tap, and this year is no exception. (Full disclosure: I am a member of AMS, although I have never given a paper myself.)

Held April 19 at Kent State University, the meeting will include about eight papers, beginning with an interesting analysis by Mark Alan Schulz of the symbolism of Willibrord Joseph Mahler's famous portrait of Beethoven in the prime of his life (pictured here). Mahler himself said it depicts the composer beating time, but Schulz will talk about how the imagery said more in Beethoven's time.

Other papers include a look at Alexander Thayer's music criticism of Beethoven and more (Grant William Cook III); Liszt's program music written in Weimar (Matthew Baumer), the making of the Western film score archetype in an analysis of Jerome Moross' music for "The Big Country" (Mariana Whitmer) and a rediscovered piano sonata by Giacinto Scelsi (Franco Sciannameo and pianist Donna Amato).

The last two are locally based: Whitmer works at the Center for American Music at the Stephen Foster Memorial in Oakland, and Sciannamo is at Carnegie Mellon University.

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