The McKeesport Symphony Orchestra has hired Bruce Lauffer as music director. Lauffer succeeds Roger Tabler, who resigned as music director last year, and will begin his tenure conducting a holiday program December 10 at the McKeesport Area High School.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, having recently announced plans to tour Europe in August, will travel to California later that season. It confirmed a performance in Orange County on March 30, 2007. The PSO will be one of several top American orchestras celebrating the opening of the Segerstrom Concert Hall (the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra among them). Other venues on the tour are not yet set. The last West Coast Tour took place in 1999.

Pittsburgh Opera has been named winner of the Brashear Association 2005 Community Service Award. The association bestowed the award in recognition of the company's "Opera Connections," an education program connecting students from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to opera.

John Mauceri, music director of the Pittsburgh Opera, has received the Magic Baton Award, presented by the Young Musicians' Foundation.