The name Barbara Hannigan is not yet mainstream, but those who love music discuss her artistry in worshipful tones, often with the word “genius” affixed. Hailing from Nova Scotia, now living on the northwest coast of France in a town aptly named Finistère (literally, end of the earth), the willowy blonde beauty is not only one of our great sopranos; she is also a conductor of the first rank. Hannigan’s specialty is contemporary music, and next weekend, in Munich, audiences will have the opportunity to experience her derring-do when she both performs and conducts one of the 20th century’s most emotionally naked and musically challenging operas: Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), composed to a libretto by Jean Cocteau and premiered in 1959. READ ON

Remember the opening of The Sound of Music? That idyllic Austrian meadow, Alps in the background, in which Julie Andrews twirls? “The hills are alive,” she sings. Actually, they weren’t. As with so many of the striking locations in Hollywood movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Cleopatra, a flat canvas held those hills. For the first museum show dedicated to Hollywood’s backdrops, the Boca Raton Museum of Art has rounded up canvases made between 1938 and 1968—22 in all. They mostly come from movies by MGM, titles such as Marie Antoinette (1938), An American in Paris (1951), and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). The exhibition also features “the grandaddy, the Babe Ruth of all Hollywood backdrops,” as Karen Maness, one of the show’s curators, describes it: Mount Rushmore, where Alfred Hitchcock, in his 1959 thriller, North by Northwest, staged his precarious penultimate scene. READ ON