FW OPERA LAUNCHES ‘FRONTIERS’: Fort Worth Opera has regularly performed new works. And with Frontiers, it will take part in their creation. The addition to the 2013 opera festival will workshop as many as eight unpublished works and give the composers a chance to get in front of both an audience and important people in the industry. The opera will announce the composers who will take part in Frontiers in September.

A GIANT ‘GIANT’: When the Dallas Theater Center opens Giant, it will be the biggest production the center has ever produced. The score was written by Michael John LaChiusa, who was approached directly by a great niece of the novel’s author, Edna Ferber. “She said, ‘You would be the one to do it,'” LaChiusa tells dallasnews.com. “I went, ‘No, this isn’t going to happen,’ and she said, ‘Read it again.'” He did, and the result of that reread will be seen at the Wyly Theatre beginning Wednesday.

CHA-CHING FOR STRING: When the Fort Worth Symphony announced in November that it would be the home of a second Stradivarius violin, a question that went unanswered was just how much does one of these instruments cost? If you’ve wondered about that, it’s worth your time to check out a story in Sunday’s New York Times magazine about the value of instruments – both monetarily and sentimentally.