On April 2, the Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC will host a day of films by Meredith Monk — an exceedingly rare opportunity to see such works as Turtle Dreams, Book of Days, and Ellis Island…. A couple of significant moves in the American classical world, bringing good news for enthusiasts of contemporary music: Chad Smith, the Chief Operating Officer of the LA Phil and the architect of so much of that orchestra's hyper-inventive programming, will add to his current duties the directorship of the Ojai Music Festival, succeeding Tom Morris; and Matías Tarnopolsky, who has been running Cal Performances in Berkeley, will move east to become the president and C. E. O. of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Congratulations to both…. On the occasion of the première of Become Desert, his latest large-scale work, John Luther Adams wrote a guide to the piece for The New York Times , and also contributed an essay to the New Yorker website about climate change in Alaska. Become Desert will be heard this week at the Seattle Symphony and on April 7 in Berkeley, courtesy of the aforementioned Cal Performances series…. I recently saw Gregory Spears's Fellow Travelers at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and found it more gripping than ever. Jonas Hacker gave a touching, vulnerable performance as Timothy Laughlin; Joseph Lattanzi repeated his commanding turn as Hawk Fuller. Henson Keys has a report for Parterre…. This weekend the PostClassical Ensemble of Washington DC will perform Shostakovich's score for The New Babylon, alongside a showing of the film…. On a not unrelated theme, I urge everyone to go see Armando Iannucci's new film The Death of Stalin. The opening scene, embellishing the apocryphal tale of Mozart, Stalin, and Maria Yudina, is alone worth the price of admission, but the movie is savagely funny all the way through. Masha Gessen wrote about it in The New Yorker; David Remnick interviewed Iannucci for the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's a spot-on Shostakovichian score by Christopher Willis, one that replicates the film's agile dance between farce and tragedy.