A typical Philadelphia Orchestra subscriber will encounter Beethoven's Fifth only about 30 or 40 times in a lifetime. We watch our favorite movies more frequently.

Piffaro's repeat performance of Kile Smith's Vespers demonstrated that Smith has produced a work that could have staying power.

At last the Baroque operas of Handel and his contemporaries have found a proper medium. It's not on the stage of any opera house, but on the cinema screens where the singers don't need to push and their subtle gestures are readily accessible. Rodelinda. Opera by Georg Frederic Handel; directed by Stephen Wadsworth; conducted by Henry Bicket. Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, Broadway and 65th St., New York. HD cinema encore showing at movie theaters Wednesday, January 4, 2012; Canadian encore January 28, 2012. www.metoperafamily.org or www.ncm.com/fathom.

I was highly critical the first time I saw director Robert Carsen's admiring characterization of the title character in La Scala's new Don Giovanni. On second viewing, I saw new cause for concern in the miscasting of Anna Netrebko.

“At Last” had been covered by a handful of artists, but the song became immortal in 1961 because of Etta James, who died January 21; and because of her, it's the icon of a poignant era in American music.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Christmas program missed some golden opportunities to peddle the Orchestra's wares to people who don't normally attend Orchestra concerts.

I'm all for tinkering with Faust, Gounod's beautiful but unwieldy relic of 19th-Century French grand opera. But it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that America's atomic scientists were cutting a deal with the devil. That honor belonged more appropriately to Hitler's scientists.

Russian opera singers like Anna Netrebko and Marina Poplavskaya have entered the mainstream. But Russian arias get little exposure. That's our loss, as AVA's recent sparkling Russian concert demonstrated.

Director Robert Carsen is so besotted with Don Giovanni's protagonist that he overlooks the opera's other fascinating characters. There's much more to Mozart's opera than one man's energetic sex life.

BSR readers have heard from a music professor and a 20-something about how to save the Philadelphia Orchestra. Let me speak for another underserved and potentially huge Orchestra constituency: suburbanites.