The Firelands Symphony has announced the appointment of Carl Topilow as music director from July.

Topilow is music director of the Cleveland Pops and is also known in Northeast Ohio for his work with the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra. Last season he led a well-received Holiday Pops concert for the Akron Symphony Orchestra, and has been invited to perform the same role for this year’s Akron holiday concert.

Highlights of the upcoming Firelands season include a performance of the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez with guitarist Jason Vieaux, and violinist Caroline Goulding soloing in the Bruch Scottish Fantasy.

After conducting two presentations in March, Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Moest has bowed out of two additional Zurich Opera performances of Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus, citing dissatisfaction with the staging. Although the operetta’s story has nothing to do with vampires or Count Dracula’s castle, Michael Sturminger’s staging uses those devices, apparently solely on the inspiration of the work’s title, which means "The Bat."

In addition to his Cleveland duties, Welser-Moest is general music director of the Zurich Opera.

More from the Chicago Tribune.

From the official Deutsche Grammophon Web site:

“For this recording, Plácido Domingo has drawn directly on the origins of music - the music of the street. Domingo and the Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid, one of Europe’s up-and-coming ensembles, have chosen the popular song form of the copla which, along with zarzuela and flamenco, constitutes the three-pronged spear of recent Spanish popular music. The copla, like its close relative, the cuplé, is music written by a composer, but one who draws so extensively on the folk music tradition that his music merges with that tradition and becomes indistinguishable from it. The great composers of Spanish coplas can proclaim with every justification: “I am folk music.”

Read the rest of the liner notes and purchase the album online here.