The cellist David Finckel remembers the first time he heard the Escher String Quartet. It was on an audition DVD. Intrigued, he arranged to watch them play. "I thought, 'Wow, they are very young, but they sound good. We can work with them,' " says Finckel, who codirects the summer festival [email protected] with his wife, the pianist Wu Han. "So we accepted them for a two-week residency the Emerson Quartet does at Stony Brook University [in New York]."

The eminent Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos raises his baton on opening night at Symphony Hall in Boston. Before a single note sounds, a cell phone rings. Frühbeck's shoulders slump, and he waits appropriately for a new starting point. As he raises his baton once more, the same cell phone rings again. He turns and glares — our offender is in the pricey seats up front — but mister no-clue actually takes the call this time, and everyone can hear him say, "I'm in Symphony Hall right now, and I may have to call you back later."

The San Francisco Symphony's festival this month, "Russian Firebrand, Russian Virtuoso: The Music of Prokofiev," conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, features, quite appropriately, four pianists (Yefim Bronfman, Vladimir Feltsman, Mikhail Rudy, and Ilya Yakushev) who, like Prokofiev, grew up or received their musical training in Russia (or in two cases, the former republics of the Soviet Union).

It's an ironic fact that these days, Handel's operas are being triumphantly presented around the world, while Christoph Gluck's are mostly ignored. Handel, for all his musical glories, was old-school opera seria — castrato singers in the primary roles, convoluted plots and subplots, and stand-and-deliver arias, one after another. Gluck, on the other hand, was the primary ignition switch on modern operatic ideology.