As a promoter, Pete Bennett has worked with some of the biggest names in the entertainment world. When you speak with him on the phone, he likes to make a few things known.

Amy Winehouse has come to take over America! She’s got the stuff to do it. There’s the rapturous voice, comparable to so many of the greats, that can effect loneliness and pain or deliver a timbred punch like a whirring bowling ball knocking out every pin. Then there’s the striking offbeat beauty, cutting an unlikely style that’s part 1960s girl group jezebel and part tattooed, hip-hop-style thugette. Her songwriting has charm and clout, too. First we caught a three-song performance at an invite-only BBC2 party. Dueting with just an acoustic guitarist, Winehouse’s powerful, no-nonsense voice communicated remarkable vulnerability, laying bare the pain of love’s loss, particularly in a torchy version of “Love Is a Losing Game.” Her set the following night at the Sixth Street club Eternal was with a full band—and not just any band. As on her breakthrough sophomore album Back to Black, Winehouse’s crack backup outfit was Sharon Jones’ boys, the Dap Kings. The set proved an uproarious ode to old-time soul but with a thoroughly modern twist, via the post-modernist reinvention of the half boozy she-devil, half wounded bird that Winehouse plays so perfectly. And she’s got the troubled diva side down. Her love of the drink and recent breakup with her beau are being blamed for the cancellation of many of her off-schedule performances during the festival later in the week.

Opera lovers in Western New York are in for a rare treat at 4pm on Sunday, April 1, at the King Concert Hall on the SUNY Fredonia campus. Peter Schickele (pictured right), a.k.a. PDQ Bach, will be starring in his own operatic work The Abduction of Figaro. (For ticket information, call 716-673-3501.) Professor Schickele, by special arrangement with own alter ego, PDQ Bach, will actually be appearing live on stage himself, in lieu of the more usual cardboard cutout used in previous productions of the opera.