Thirteen months after entering Chapter 11, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association Wednesday night filed its plan for exiting bankruptcy. With consent — sometimes hard-won — now in place from key creditors, the orchestra’s blueprint for recovery will be considered by U.S. Bankruptcy Court in coming months. If the plan draws no objections and Judge Eric L. Frank approves it, the orchestra expects to be out of bankruptcy by July 31.

More here.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, 86, the high priest of art song, has died in Bavaria. 

BBC obituary here. New York Times here.

Musical flash mobs have produced their own video genre, and this example, in which Grieg sneaks up on train commuters in Copenhagen, might be the best so far. The sound quality is extremely clear, which heightens the drama. More important, perhaps, the editors chose reaction shots that gorgeously illustrate the power of music. The video has clocked more than 2.5 million views. This one is pure joy.

This week, 105 students from the Curtis Institute of Music play three concerts in Dresden - including one by the orchestra Tuesday (night in Dresden, afternoon in Philadelphia) to be streamed live here.

The program: Brahms. His Symphony No. 2, the Concerto for Violin and Cello (with soloists Ray Chen and Jan Vogler), the Academic Festival Overture and other works. Robert Spano conducts. Streaming starts just after 2 p.m.

To track reports on the Curtis in Dresden, look here.

Photo: Curtis students and conductor Rossen Milanov perform at Friday night's "Gateway to Europe" concert opening the Mann season.

Orchestra groupies might have noticed a few interesting changes in the composition of the Philadelphia Orchestra for Thursday night's Elektra in Verizon Hall. In addition to the Wagner tubas, the orchestra was joined by a special guest playing assistant principal horn: Julie Landsman, principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra from 1985-2010. Landsman was helping out her former student, principal hornist Jennifer Montone, on the heavy-duty part.

Strauss' score calls for heckelphone, a four-foot oboe. Jonathan Blumenfeld handled the part on bass oboe. Both instruments are pitched an octave below the regular oboe.

Also, if you think you saw violists playing violin, you're right. Six violists switched to violin in the piece.

A total of 117 instrumentalists were on stage, an orchestra spokeswoman said. Not Mahler Symphony No. 8, but impressive nonetheless.

The orchestra has never done Elektra before (except for an excerpt, in 1956). So Saturday's repeat may be your last chance locally for a while.

At the Curtis Institute of Music Wednesday, students, faculty, board members and other friends celebrated Eleanor Sokoloff's 75 years. Seventy-five is not her age. It's the number of years she's been teaching piano at the conservatory.

"Actually, Eleanor has been a part of the Curtis family for 82 years," former Curtis director Gary Graffman told the crowd that stuffed the lobby of Curtis' main building on Rittenhouse Square. He was counting in her first Curtis tenure as a student. "She came here as a teenage piano prodigy, and, to make a long story short, she never left."

No one knows how many pupils she's taught over the years. But at least 75 of them have gone on to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra. "No other piano teacher can begin to compete with that record," said Graffman.

How do you fete an employee in the same job for 75 years? A gold watch? That's for amateurs. In Curtis tradition, this week's Wednesday tea - the last of the year - was held in Sokoloff's honor. Sheet cake was served, this one augmented with fondant icing fashioned in the likeness of one of her signature hats.

Sokoloff, 97, is devoted to her students, and can often be found in the school's recital hall, or at Verizon Hall, listening and cheering them on. This, however, was her day to accept applause. She thanked "so many wonderful colleagues and students. I'm just so grateful."

The school year ends in a few days, and then Sokoloff expects to be back teaching in the fall for more Mozart, more Bach, more finger exercises.

Said Graffman: "People assume she gets her boundless energy from her students. I believe it is actually the other way around."

Maurice Sendak, 83, who became one of the 20th century's great children's book authors by recognizing in his young reader an often under-estimated sophistication for appreciating the joy and messiness of being human, died Tuesday.

Mr. Sendak's themes encompassed matters both dark and light - in not only books, but also set design and art direction for opera, ballet, TV and film - and were so diverse in tone as to suggest more than one author. And yet his creations and their aesthetic were his alone: cross-hatched figures with fangs and horns, a cherubic lad who sips chicken soup with rice through the months of the year, an objectionable boy named Pierre who only would say, "I don't care!"

In both his portrayal of the terrors of being a child and the deep flaws of adults, Mr. Sendak was a throwback to an earlier era in children's literature, when 19th century books like like Heinrich Hoffmann's "Der Struwwelpeter" lacked the sweetness and justice of a well-ordered world.

For Mr. Sendak - himself never a parent - children were complete beings, capable of the best and worst character traits. On the one hand, there was obstreperous Pierre. On the other, he idealized Grimm's Hansel and Gretel, devising richly colored costumes and sets.

"It's terrifying how [Hansel and Gretel] need each other, the wit and wisdom of having to get out of trouble, how they forgive the worse damage - they forgive their father. It's about the heart-stopping simplicity and goodwill and lovingness of children," Mr. Sendak said to me in 2007, when his production of the Humperdinck masterpiece was being staged by the Opera Company of Philadelphia.

In that conversation he described his process as a rather matter-of-fact affair. "It comes by intuition. That's the way it works. I'll try out an illustration. You get a feeling and you search out the feeling with the pencil until it's like the feeling you're having. Other people either get the feeling or they don't."

Millions did. Tucked in nearly every bed-side bookshelf in the U.S. is at least one of Mr. Sendak's nearly 100 titles: "In the Night Kitchen," "Where the Wild Things Are," "Higglety Pigglety Pop!" and the quartet of wee volumes boxed in The Nutshell Library: "Alligators All Around," "Chicken Soup With Rice," "One Was Johnny" and "Pierre."

Many of Mr. Sendak's papers are held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library - on Delancey Place - whose director, Derick Dreher, has written a lovely send-off for the author. He last visited the Rosenbach in April, traveling from his Connecticut home to Philadelphia to see the Chertoff mural, his only surviving large-scale work (other than sets), which the Rosenbach recently installed and restored.

Writes Dreher: "Early fame put pressure on Mr. Sendak to cultivate a public persona that was curmudgeonly, cynical, even aloof. Those who were granted access to his private sphere, however, know that the real Maurice Sendak was a generous host, an erudite student with well-founded opinions on art, music and literature, and the best friend anybody could have...An artist right down to the melancholic core, retire was the one thing Mr. Sendak could never do. He was driven to write and draw - and read and listen - until the very end. If we are lucky, some of what was on his drafting table in recent months will eventually find its way into print."

The Rosenbach's Sendak Gallery is open Tuesday free of charge.

A Curtis Institute of Music student died Thursday night in the school’s Locust Street dorm in Lenfest Hall, school officials said. Louisa Womack, 20, a double bass player from Rochester, N.Y., was in her second year at the music conservatory. No further information about her death was available Friday.

School faculty, students and administrators “gathered formally on Friday morning, by which time all students, faculty, and staff had been notified. Curtis’s team of student services and mental health professionals has been and will continue to be onsite and available to students 24/7, and all students have been offered counseling whenever and wherever they need it,” a spokeswoman said.

Curtis has curtailed its performance schedule at least through the weekend.

* * *

Update (Monday, 9:45 p.m.): Womack's death has been ruled a suicide by the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, a spokesman for that agency said. 

Photo: In an expression of grief, Curtis students carpeted the school's front entrance with flowers.

New York radio station WQXR took down a blog post critical of the Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle after Met general manager Peter Gelb complained to the station's chief, the New York Times reports.

I guess we know who reads his reviews.

Here's Dan Wakin's piece on the episode (scroll down to May 1).