The end is near, courtesy of the Met

The saga has been playing out for than a year. Events are leading inexorably downhill. The world is about to go up in flames.

While that might apply to the European debt crisis and its chances of taking down the global economy, I'll leave that judgment to others. The conflagration that's undoubtedly at hand will break out in movie theaters Saturday.

The Metropolitan Opera has reached the big finish "The Ring of the Nibelung," Richard Wagner's four-part tale of gods and greed. The fourth and last installment, "The Twilight of the Gods," will beam out from New York into hundreds of theaters -- including Stonecrest and Concord Mills -- Feb. 11 at noon. An encore showing will come at a date to be announced.

It's the finale of a sequence that began in September, 2010, when the Met unveiled its new staging of the cycle's first installment. Now, the warrior sweethearts Siegfried and Brunnhilde will pick up where they left off in the third opera's love-duet conclusion. They're blissfully unaware that the gold ring he puts on her finger is cursed. But they'll soon find out the hard way, and Wagner's music will take them and the audiences on an epic journey of grandeur, gloom and apocalypse.

The cast will again include Jay Hunter Morris, the tenor plucked from relative obscurity earlier this season to play Siegfried. His route from his hometown of Paris, Texas, to the Met supplies the feelgood story to counterbalance Wagner's catastrophe. But he isn't the first singer to go from small-time Texas to the Wagnerian big-time.

One of the top Wagner singers of the 1960s and '70s was Thomas Stewart, a baritone from San Saba, Texas -- which is only a tenth the size of Paris. He became a regular at the ultimate Wagner shrine: Germany's Bayreuth Festival, founded by the composer himself. He gives Morris something to aspire to.

BofA exec has strings attached

The people who cheered for the young violin soloist with the Charlotte Symphony last weekend might want to think a few grateful thoughts about a key player who was nowhere in sight: the Bank of America executive who helped equip Chad Hoopes to make so much of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto.

Someone with Hoopes' flair, finesse and spontaneity could probably hit home with almost any old fiddle. But Hoopes (photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco) plays an instrument by the man who's synonymous with great violins: Antonio Stradivari.

How does a 12th-grader from Cleveland, Ohio -- even a competition-winning one -- get hold of a Strad? It wasn't his prize for winning the Yehudi Menuhin violin competition. The last sentence of his official bio, printed in the program wherever he plays, says simply that Hoopes uses the violin -- which will have its 300th birthday next year -- "courtesy of Jonathan Moulds."

Moulds is a British violin collector. And he may be the highest-ranking BofA executive whom most people in the bank's hometown have never heard of: BofA's London-based president for Europe and the chief executive of Merrill Lynch International. The last sentence of his official bio says: "He is a keen collector of fine musical instruments."

That's putting it mildly. At the time of a 2006 newspaper profile in the Yorkshire Post, from the British region where he grew up, Moulds owned three Strads and one violin by another revered maker, Giuseppe Guarnieri del Gesu.

Moulds, whose mother is a music teacher, grew up studying the violin and viola. Music won him a scholarship to college at Cambridge, but he majored in math. He explained his choice of career to the Yorkshire Post this way: "The first thought was that music was too damn hard. The second thought was that I could keep it as a hobby."

Moulds landed in the financial industry. In 1994, the Chicago firm he worked for was bought by then-NationsBank. His trajectory from that point was upward, obviously.

While great violins can easily command seven-figure prices, Moulds declined to discuss his collection's value with the Yorkshire paper other than to say it had been "a spectacularly good investment." One violin from Moulds' stable -- nicknamed, as many are, for a former owner -- is the "Lord Spencer" Strad, which once belonged to an ancestor of Lady Di. Moulds has loaned that one out to another up-and-coming violinist, the UK's Nicola Benedetti.

When he isn't tending to BofA and Merrill, Moulds leads a group that's working to increase private-sector support for the arts in Great Britain. And he still plays the violin. As he told the Post: "It keeps me sane."

Help solve uptown murder mystery

The front-page photo of the Arts & Science Council's president being led away by an officer must have caught a few eyes. Now everyone can help get to the bottom of it.

"No signs of breaking and entering," the police report says. "Nothing stolen. The security cameras show nothing conclusive. Just a security officer with his skull smashed."

The crime scene was the Mint Museum, but the clues are all over uptown.

The slaying was plotted by the ASC for "The Lady of Charlotte," a murder mystery whose authorship is a mystery, too. The story -- with the clues woven into the text -- is spread across 10 kiosks and bus shelters uptown.

The truth is out there.

The saga begins in front of the Rock Bottom restaurant at North Tryon and Seventh streets. Readers can follow it from there, and when they think they've solved the crime, they can submit their finding to the ASC on Facebook.

The ASC will reveal the guilty party -- as well as the story's author -- on Feb. 14 at a time and place to be announced. The sleuths who have identified the killer correctly get the chance to win a yearlong pass to the Mint and $100 gift card from CarolinaTix.

The mystery, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is meant to "bring the written word to Charlotte in an unexpected way," said ASC president Scott Provancher. That was before the officer interrupted the ASC's campaign kickoff Tuesday and hustled him away.

Warren-Green's St. Louis 'Saga'

Christopher Warren-Green is back home with the Charlotte Symphony after a weekend with one of the country's leading orchestras.

The St. Louis Symphony brought in Warren-Green on mere days' notice after the scheduled conductor, Russia's Vassily Sinaisky, bowed out. Warren-Green had to fly directly from Maine, where he led the Portland Symphony last Tuesday, Jan. 24, to St. Louis, where the first rehearsal was the next day.

That was the easy part, compared to this: The program included a work Warren-Green had never conducted, Jan Sibelius' "En Saga." So Warren-Green had to cram -- which is no simple task when you're talking about a quarter-hour of brooding Nordic music.

"'En Saga' is one of (Sibelius') deepest pieces," Warren-Green said. "He wrote it late in life. There's more of him in it than in any other piece.

"It was not an easy piece to interpret. But it came out OK," he added, emphasizing the OK -- as if he were saying, "OK but not great."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was more positive. Critic Sarah Bryan Miller wrote that Sibelius' "received a deeply felt and well-played performance."

Now that Warren-Green has "En Saga" in his head, be on the lookout for it here.

"I think we should program it in Charlotte," he said. "It's a really good piece."

The St.Louis concerts climaxed with Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony -- which Warren-Green will also lead with the Charlotte Symphony in March.

"Warren-Green brought a sure hand to shaping the symphony, bringing out all the inherent power ... and bringing it to a thrilling conclusion," Miller wrote, adding:

"Warren-Green will be back next season: excellent news."

Warren-Green, who debuted in St. Louis a decade ago, sounds glad about that, too.

"I remember thinking what a good orchestra they were then," he said, "and they're even better now."

Another switch: Opera Carolina just had to find a replacement, too.

Anthony Dean Griffey, a High Point native and Wingate University alumnus, was scheduled to play the poet Lensky in Opera Carolina's March staging of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin." For Griffey, who has performed with some of the world's leading opera companies, this would've finally been his operatic debut in his native state.

But N.C. will have to wait. Griffey has been "forced to withdraw ... for personal reasons," Opera Carolina said in a statement.

The company signed up Yeghishe Manucharyan, a native of Armenia who has sung at New York's Metropolitan Opera and an array of other companies. With him in the picture, Opera Carolina's James Meena noted, all three of the "Onegin" leads will be Russian-speaking performers.

The performances will be March 17-25. If you'd like a foretaste, YouTube has a video of Manucharyan performing the aria Lensky sings before his fateful duel with his friend Onegin. I'd embed it, but YouTube has that blocked. Sorry!

Opera Carolina hopes free tickets pay off

The role reversal defied natural law: The butterfly swung the net and captured the people.

Well, almost. Actually, it was not a winged insect but a flight of melody, "Madama Butterfly." It still performed a feat, though. Puccini's opera hauled in the largest turnout Opera Carolina has ever had.

More than 9,200 people attended the five performances, general director James Meena said. That easily passes Opera Carolina's previous record -- more than 7,500 for four performances of "Porgy and Bess" in 2004.

"Butterfly" (photo by jonsilla.com) has been popular for generations, but it had help this time. Opera Carolina supplied an eye-catching production featuring sets and costumes by Japanese artist Jun Kaneko. And a batch of donors led by the Knight Foundation paid for Opera Carolina to give out the tickets to two performances for free to people who had never seen the company at work.

"Hopefully, a lot of people will go out saying, 'This is really great,'" Meena said last week before the first free show.

While the standing ovation that night was a favorable sign, it's hard to know just how much weight to attach to it, since everything gets a standing ovation in Charlotte. The reaction that really counts will come later, if some of those first-time guests to buy tickets and come back for another opera.

Free performances are a risky business. Just ask the Charlotte Symphony.

After decades of playing for free at SouthPark every summer -- losing money, in the absence of sponsors -- the orchestra worked itself into a situation where Summer Pops was taken for granted. When the group instituted a $5 fee last summer, some people took it as an affront.

That lined up with what the Knight Foundation found when it sponsored a study of the orchestra business a decade ago. Looking for ways orchestras could attract new listeners, the study looked at the role free concerts might play. The verdict:

"Free programming and outreach do not turn people into ticket buyers," the report said. "They simply turn them into consumers of free programming."

Opera Carolina is aware of the danger, Meena says. While it may aim for another free performance next season, it doesn't plan to make such things a staple. It also plans to promote any giveaways in targeted ways -- such as through partnerships with civic groups -- rather than through broader advertising.

"Now it's up to us to engage all those folks," Meena said, "and see if we can make them repeat attenders."

'3 Superstars in Berlin' -- via Crownpoint

Now that the Metropolitan Opera's movie-theater showings have gotten opera lovers accustomed to the commute between home and Stonecrest or Concord Mills, a concert featuring two Met favorites may put another multiplex on their radar.

Anna Netrebko (right) and Jonas Kaufmann are the big draws of "3 Superstars in Berlin," showing Wednesday, Feb. 1, at the Crownpoint Stadium 12. The third singer in the spotlight: Uruguayan bass Erwin Schrott.

While Schrott also has a major career -- with Mozart's Don Giovanni as one of his specialties -- he's not as well-known to U.S. audiences as his two colleagues. Maybe this concert, taped at an outdoor venue in Germany last year, will let him gain from their box-office power.

The Met's multiplex audiences know them well. Netrebko -- offstage, Schrott's wife -- appeared most recently as Henry VIII's doomed wife in Donizetti's "Anna Bolena." Kaufmann starred last in the 1940s-era updating of Gounod's "Faust" in December. The movie-theater series has yet to feature Schrott.

In the concert, the three will mix-and-match in music ranging from "Don Giovanni" and "Faust" to "Porgy and Bess" and "West Side Story." The screening starts at 7 p.m. at Crownpoint on Monroe Road.

Now that the Metropolitan Opera's movie-theater showings have gotten opera lovers accustomed to the commute between home and Stonecrest or Concord Mills, a concert featuring two Met favorites may put another muliplex on their radar.

Anna Netrebko (right) and Jonas Kaufmann are the big draws of "3 Superstars in Berlin," showing Wednesday, Feb. 1, at the Crownpoint Stadium 12 . The third singer in the spotlight: Uruguayan bass Erwin Schrott.

While Schrott also has a major career -- with Mozart's Don Giovanni as one of his specialties -- he's not as well-known to U.S. audiences as his two colleagues. Maybe this concert, taped at an outdoor venue in Germany last year, will let him gain from their box-office power.

The Met's multiplex audiences know them well. Netrebko -- offstage, Schrott's wife -- appeared most recently as Henry VIII's doomed wife in Donizetti's "Anna Bolena." Kaufmann starred last in the 1940s-era updating of Gounod's "Faust" in December. The movie-theater series has yet to feature Schrott.

In the concert, the three will mix-and-match in music ranging from "Don Giovanni" and "Faust" to "Porgy and Bess" and "West Side Story." The screening starts at 7 p.m. at Crownpoint on Monroe Road.