Classicist Charlotte Eagar writes about her project, with her husband and a Syrian director, to stage the antiwar Greek tragedy in Arabic translation with a cast of women who have fled their homeland’s vicious civil war for neighboring Jordan.
Peter Aspden: “There are few more powerful forms of revolt against stuffocation” – the feeling of being stifled by having too many things – “than to submit to an artistic experience.”
Vancouver Symphony music director Bramwell Tovey, himself a Canadian opera composer, argues that COC general director Alexander Neef is deliberately neglecting a key part of his job as head of the national company.
In Age Of University Museums, A Thriver
Source: Real Clear Arts | Published on 2014-01-07
How many pianos are still being made in Europe?
Source: Slipped Disc | Published on 2014-01-06
Innovation to what end?
Source: Jumper | Published on 2014-01-06
Saul Zaentz
Source: RiffTides | Published on 2014-01-06
“After a year dominated by upstarts like “selfie,” “bitcoin” and “twerk,” the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year honor for 2013 has gone to a seemingly old-hat vocabulary item.”
“Despite the high number of pirated films, however, Hollywood isn’t hurting. The latest numbers show that 2013′s box office is poised to be the best yet with $10.9 billion domestically, slightly edging out 2012′s $10.8 billion.”
“Records set over the Christmas period included a best-ever week for a straight play on Broadway when the Barrymore Theatre’s revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall earned $1.4 million (£845,000).”
“The maker era might not be upon us yet, but the maker movement has arrived. Just who are these people? Like the Arts and Crafts movement—a mélange of back-to-the-land simplifiers, socialists, anarchists, and tweedy art connoisseurs—the makers are a diverse bunch.”
“California’s famous innovation factory, which counts Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Reed Hastings of Netflix, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger of Instagram, and Peter Thiel of PayPal among its alumni, has discovered that arts are the future.”
“When the people who have paid for the film are also your audience, you lose the latitude to innovate and surprise. Two roles that used to be distinct – investor and consumer – are now one, and as such the way the filmmakers can work is altered and limited, if they are to avoid a fan backlash and get funded a second time.”
“The next news to report is rather discouraging, and confirms something widely reported in the press last autumn: female conductors were a rarity last year, and just one of our 100 busiest conductors was a woman.”
“I realized that things that look like magic are often just many hours of invisible practice. Since then I’ve learned guitar, cello, singing, card tricks, juggling, unicycling, origami, public speaking and design. There’s something really rewarding about not knowing how to do something, practicing like crazy, and then being able to do it.”
” I read the other day that a “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” lunch box from 1973 now sells for $1,200—and that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History owns one. I’m not quite sure which of those facts makes me sadder.”
Sadly, Ron Athey’s career remains emblematic of a perverse trend: another American artist exiled because of the fierceness of his or her talent.
“Spider-Man” had 1,268 performances in all, a healthy run by Broadway standards – but not nearly enough to come close to earning back the original $75 million capitalization to create and stage the musical.