"After an over-five-year closure, New York’s Frick Collection will once again welcome the public to its Upper East Side Gilded Age mansion — now newly expanded and renovated by Selldorf Architects — on April 17." - Artnet
"BBC World Service is set to axe 130 jobs as it seeks to save around £6 million for the next financial year. Planned cost-saving measures include closing posts across the service in the UK and internationally as well as cutting roles in BBC Monitoring." - Press Association (UK)
That budget gap (the orchestra's fifth in six years) is due to the end of COVID-related financial assistance from the Federal government. Yet earned income (including ticket sales) was a record $11.6 million, up 22% over the previous year. - The Minnesota Star Tribune
He spent 40 years (1964-2004) as music director of the Tokyo Symphony, assisted the young Seiji Ozawa at the Toronto Symphony in 1968-69, and served as music director of the Vancouver SO (1972-1985) and Syracuse SO (1985-1993), raising standards greatly at both orchestras. - Vancouver Sun (MSN)
Top-level lion dancing in China incorporates acrobatics and martial arts — and has traditionally excluded women from performing. But an 80-member lion-dancing troupe called Lingdong, in the city of Shantou, is one-quarter female; its coach intends to bring that to 50-50 and, eventually, to train an all-women group. - AFP (Yahoo!)
Edmond Dédé was born in 1827 to a free Black family of musicians in New Orleans. He settled and made his career in France. In 1887 in Bordeaux, he completed Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan, a full-fledged French grand opera which was never performed — until now. - Early Music America
The cost-benefit calculation is complicated and nuanced, requiring us to find a course between apocalyptic visions of civilizational decline and the naive utopianism of Silicon Valley. - LA Review of Books
The venue, designed by Chicago-based JDJ Architects, will be called the Checkout, a nod to the building’s former life as a 7-Eleven, and doubles as part of ACM’s hopes for the establishment. - Chicago Sun-Times
The paper, just published in the American Journal of Physics, derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass with 44 contributing authors. - Ars Technica
Othuke Ominiabohs started Masobe – which means “let us read” in the Isoko language – in 2018 with a $7,000 (£5,600) loan from his sister. In doing so, he joined a wave of new independent African publishers nurturing emerging African writers and getting fresh, exciting literature to African readers. - The Guardian
Sotheby’s auction sales were down 28 percent, to $4.6 billion, from $6.4 billion, but private sales were up 17 percent, climbing from $1.2 billion in 2023 to $1.4 billion. Christie’s, for its part, reported a 41-percent jump in private sales, to $1.5 billion—their highest level since 2020. - Artnet
"The organizers have said, essentially, that the event has gotten too big for Park City. When Sundance arrives every January, it balloons the ski town of 8,200 full-time residents into a snowy circus, with over 20,000 people streaming in from around the globe." - The New York Times
