Nicola Benedetti, the CBSO and BBC ensembles to perform

MATSUMOTO, Japan — The big news from Asia about Western classical music has been coming for a decade from China, where the surge in education and performance has been explosive. The brash and hugely gifted pianist Lang Lang has been an apt symbol of that explosion, though new star Chinese performers and composers seem to emerge by the month.

There is a lot of expectation about the new theater being built in Miami for the New World Symphony, it is planned to be inaugurated by October 2010.

NAISSAAR, Estonia – In the Baltic Sea, about 45 minutes from Tallinn, the boat full of music devotees arrives at this near-desert island, then rides in army-style trucks past rusty Soviet war machinery and defused mines to a concert hall called Omari Barn – for music they can’t hear anywhere else.

ON a recent Saturday night in Connewitz, an emerging neighborhood of artists and students in Leipzig, Germany, the streets were buzzing. At Werk II, a former factory complex, a group of hoodie-clad 20-somethings drank beer in a cobblestone courtyard, waiting for the Canadian indie rock band Wolf Parade to perform after a guitar-heavy set from the Dutch band We vs. Death.

LONDON (Billboard) – A new outdoor music event is braving the British weather to bring the rock festival model to the classical genre. While one-off outdoor classical events in the United Kingdom are commonplace throughout the summer, the three-day Serenata Festival in Dorset, England, claims to be the first to offer on-site camping facilities along the lines of the Glastonbury fest.

Break-dancing combines with Bach in Berlin this month as an award-winning dance group and an avant-garde musical director put an ultra-modern spin on the composer’s almost 300-year-old music. For 12 nights from Tuesday, Berlin-based Flying Steps, four times world champions in break-dance, perform to works from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.