Apologies for something not directly about UCs but I just wanted to acknowledge the death yesterday of the great Hungarian-born cellist, János Starker - a survivor of Nazi and Soviet oppression and (perhaps as a consequence) a man with a rather ruthless no-nonsense approach to life, but totally committed to making good music.
While I personally appreciate his very strong advocacy of, and in some cases commissioning of, music not wholly within the remit of this forum (well, Dohnanyi's concertstuck I guess, but Kodaly and David Diamond, no), I hope some agreement can be had that classical music has lost a strong voice and a great cellist.
Well to keep it "on topic", he recorded a very lovely disc of David Popper encores (with Shigeo Neriki on Piano), on Delos.