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When a new festival for opera and musical theater called "Prototype" opened in New York last month, it wasn't inaugurated with a huge new piece. Instead, the festival was kicked off with the first staging of Mohammed Fairouz' opera Sumeida's Song — a work for four singers and a handful of musicians that lasts just 60 minutes long, presented at Here, a theater in Manhattan's Tribeca that seats just 100 people.

Yesterday, pianist Sara Davis Buechner published on the New York Times website a brave and moving account of her experiences as a transgendered person. "As David Buechner, born in the northwest suburbs of Baltimore in 1959," she writes, "I became an internationally known concert pianist. But from the time I was a child, I understood that I was meant to be Sara."

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Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

Petra Haden had a problem when she was a child: "I remember watching Looney Tunes cartoons and having the music stuck in my head," the singer and violinist says.

The Paris-based Quatuor Ebene — the "Ebony Quartet" — has risen fast in the musical world with two separate artistic identities. In recent years, audiences have gotten to know the "other" Ebenes — the sophisticated cover band that plays everything from "Miserlou" (the Pulp Fiction theme) to jazz to "Someday My Prince Will Come" (yes, the one from Disney's Snow White).

Miloš Karadaglić first studied guitar at the age of 8 in his home country of Montenegro, formerly part of Yugoslavia. At 14, Karadaglić was invited to play at a concert hall in Paris, and he later traveled to Italy to meet classical guitarist David Russell, who advised him to enroll at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Got an idea for a classical cartoon, or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.