Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“If I wasn’t an actor, I think I’d have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life—it’s an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.”
Laurence Olivier (quoted in Foster Hirsch, Laurence Olivier)
Frank Sinatra sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” (from A Little Night Music).This performance, taped in front of a live audience, was originally telecast by NBC on November 18, 1973, as part of Magnavox Presents Frank Sinatra. The arrangement is by Gordon Jenkins:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
From 2009:
Read the whole thing here.A great man (or woman) is too big to cram into a book-sized box. The best that you can do is offer a summary of the current state of knowledge about him, written from your own point of view–but you can never know everything there is to know. The day after your book is published, somebody may dig up an immensely important fact that you missed, or interpret the facts that you dug up in a way that makes more sense than your version. Biographical understanding is a journey without a destination, only stops along the way….
“Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents.”
Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary
George Raft and Carole Lombard dance a duet in Rumba, a 1935 film directed by Marion Gering. The song to which they are dancing is Ralph Rainger’s “The Magic of You”:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.”
Martha Graham, “The American Dance”
Read the whole thing here.Chopin…was a publicity-shunning introvert who played only his own music and performed mainly in the salons of Paris and England on increasingly rare occasions. He made his living teaching piano to well-heeled students of indifferent ability. He wrote no autobiography, died too soon to make records, and left behind no symphonies, string quartets, operas, or ballets for a later generation of writers to parse at leisure and at length. By all rights, then, Chopin should have gone the way of the many other 19th-century pianist-composers whose renown did not outlive them. Instead, his music is as familiar today as it was at the time of his death in 1849. It is ubiquitous—but is it truly great?
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Vladimir Horowitz plays Chopin’s G Minor Ballade at Carnegie Hall in 1968. This performance is part of a solo recital by Horowitz that was originally telecast in prime time on CBS: