The ensemble, founded in 1946, was believed to be the longest-running chamber orchestra in the US. While it has faced the same post-COVID financial problems that have plagued many performing-arts organizations, the PCO’s biggest difficulty has been recovering from the sudden death in 2023 of popular artistic director Yaacov Bergman. - Willamette Week (Portland)
Derrer — who came to The Dallas Opera in 2018 and then steered the company through COVID, raised $54.5 million and doubled the endowment, and commissioned and staged multiple new works — will take the helm at the COC in Toronto as of July 1. - CultureMap Dallas
“The Southbank Centre in London, which includes the Hayward Gallery, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Undercroft skatepark and was once voted ‘Britain's ugliest building’, has been heritage-listed. Completed along the River Thames in the 1960s, the post-war landmark has now been Grade II-listed by the Department for Culture Media and Sport.” - Dezeen
“The answer is that festivals in India are only partly about books. They are a ‘spectacle’ offering music, dance, handicraft sales and food. Even the T.rex of them all, the Jaipur literature festival (which attracted 400,000 visitors last month according to its marketing team), would almost certainly attract fewer people without these extras.” - The Guardian
“I like this construction of London and Manchester,” he tells me, at the Coliseum. “And I like the spirit of pioneering, of becoming an opera company in a city that previously hasn’t had a resident opera company.” - The Guardian
“In Speak, American tap dancers collaborate with their counterparts in kathak, a classical Indian percussive dance form. While these genres have been crossed before, rarely have the participants been such masters of their art.” - The New York Times
Through Hart’s teaching business, Plot Prose, she’s working on a proprietary piece of software that can “generate a book based on an outline in less than an hour, and costs between $80 and $250 a month.” - Gizmodo
New research published in the Australian Journal of Education this week found fewer students in high school and university were choosing to study the creative arts. At the same time, it found, dozens of tertiary courses were being slashed. - The Guardian
Campaign groups want a change to the victims and courts bill, which is currently making its way through parliament, to stop police from being able to present lyrics as evidence except when they are “literal, rather than figurative or fictional”. - The Guardian
“Deakins – cinematographer to the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese and Sam Mendes, whose work has earned him 14 Oscar nominations and two wins, five BAFTAs, a knighthood and a reputation for being the greatest practitioner of his craft alive – is struggling to explain just exactly what he does.” - The Guardian
How, against all odds, has City Lights managed to remain a vital symbol of literary dissent and free speech? How, after more than seventy years, has City Lights survived economic and industry changes? How, decade after decade, has it managed to respond to the forces that threaten to silence us? - LitHub
The sides will be negotiating in a Hollywood far different from 2023. Production has slowed significantly industrywide, as many entertainment companies struggle to adjust to the streaming world. Work has dried up for many actors, writers and directors. At the same time, the rise of generative artificial intelligence has become more central. - The New York Times
If most middle-class homes are devoid of book-- if you can sit in an airport departure lounge or train all day and not see anyone reading--then why, come winter, do more than 100 literature festivals bloom every year, even in the smallest and unlikeliest of towns? - The Guardian
“Browsing Letterboxd, you find an eclectic range of tastes, tones and approaches to movie-watching, a buffet of high and low, mainstream and esoterica. … If Rotten Tomatoes has become a tool of Hollywood’s homogenizing marketing machinery, Letterboxd is something else: a cinephilic hive buzzing with authentic enthusiasm and heterogeneous tastes.” - The New York Times Magazine
When men do join singing groups, they often avoid the tenor section. The tenor voice is “a cultivated sound”, says John Potter, author of a book on the subject. A man with no vocal training is more likely to have the range of a baritone (a high bass). - The Economist
