George Benjamin will take over the Mostly Mozart Festival next week, as Written on Skin, an honest-to-God twenty-first-century operatic masterpiece (my review is here), receives three performances at the venue formerly known as the New York State Theater. Alan Gilbert conducts. On Aug. 16, Benjamin himself will lead ICE in a program of Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques, Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, and his own Into the Little Hill. Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the piano soloist at the latter concert…. On Sedge Clark’s blog, Victoria Bond gives an insider’s perspective on Musikfabrik’s recent performances of Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury: she was the Old Goat Woman in the original production…. I’m proud to be a mere footnote in Kyle Gann’s soon-to-be-canonical study of the Ives Concord Sonata…. At the site Hyperallegric, Alison Kinney has a superb piece on African-American opera singers and the Met’s belated decision to abandon blackface…. Musical America notes that Orin O’Brien, the first woman to join the New York Philharmonic, was recently honored at the Music Academy of the West. Bernstein hired her in 1966; she is still a member of the double-bass section. She is the daughter of the actor George O’Brien, the male lead in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.