ArtsCriticATL.com

Actually, that headline could also be “L’Oiseau de Google,” because today is Igor Stravinsky’s birthday and Google’s homepage today honors the date.

By CATHERINE FOX and PIERRE RUHE

Update 3:11. Impossible to listen and walk around and type during the presentation, but basically the new 25-year master plan involves many of the elements that WAC leaders (and local critics) have been talking about for several years. If you’ve been following the saga thus far, you’ll not be surprised by this. Arts center CEO Joe Bankoff said this new master plan is “a roadmap, not a timeline.” There’s no start date and no budget.

In 1910, downtown Atlanta’s First Congregational Church of Christ launched what was then called the Atlanta Colored Music Festival, a program involving black and white composers and performers that helped “discourage violence and advance respect between white and black Atlantans.” The concerts were a sensation, drawing a diverse crowd in an era of boiling racial tension, just four years after the Atlanta race riots.

The original festival didn’t last long. Last year, First Congregational’s minister Dwight Andrews, an elegant and impassioned composer, revived the festival as part of his congregation’s legacy. He made the point that the original event…

By RONALD BROUN

Blake’s perception of “the universe in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower” applies equally to Bach’s Two- and Three-Part Inventions — those domestic studies written to teach his kids how to play two lines of music sounding together, and then three lines sounding together.

These pieces typically last only a minute or two. But they yield continual insights of how creative genius — operating with only the slightest materials — can make much from almost nothing at all. Played routinely, as practice exercises, the Inventions sound like exercises; performed well, they belie their simplicity and offer stabbing emotional rewards.…

Former Atlanta Symphony Orchestra music director Yoel Levi doesn’t have much opera under his belt, relatively speaking, but he’s making up for it at the Atlanta Opera.

Announcing details of its 30th anniversary, the opera revealed that the Romanian-born, Israeli-raised conductor will lead two productions in 2009-2010 — or 50% of the season. Although he split with the ASO in 2000, and has limited opera experience on his résumé — including a 2007 “Hansel & Gretel” with Atlanta Opera — his fan base in Atlanta probably remains huge…

By RONALD BROUN

“Tangos, Fados and Dance!” Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting the ASO. Luciana Souza, mezzo-soprano and percussion; Scott Tennant, guitar; Rosa Collantes and Stefan Zawistowski, dancers. Attended Saturday, June 6.

Although the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s two-week festival featuring the music, dance, and culture of South America was monstrously overshadowed by a single piece for cello and orchestra — Osvaldo Golijov’s “Azul” — that is no rap on the festival itself, which traversed worlds of unfamiliar terrain with stylish charm and quicksilver rhythmic arabesques not often encountered this far north.

A week later, on June 5, the festival’s last program — aptly titled “Tangos, Fados and Dance!” — provided a satisfying conclusion to the two previous symphonic programs…