So Christine Brewer has fired her agent at IMG for, the soprano says, “multi-booking” her next spring for The Sound of Music at Lyric Opera of Chicago and a concert gig with the St. Louis Symphony. This smells fishy to me.

Why would Brewer sign the contract with LOC and allow her name to be announced as far back as July 29 if she knew she had a St. Louis engagement already during the April-May Sound of Music period—as announced in a press release from February of 2012? Brewer doesn’t have the busiest schedule, after all.

The upshot of all this, though, is that for all her protests that St. Louis is very dear and important to her, Brewer is not singing with the Symphony there this season; she’s doing the LOC gig instead. I just don’t quite see why this is all the manager’s fault—except that everything that goes wrong in a singer’s career is the manager’s fault, by default. [via Slipped Disc]