Stories

What Do We Want From Reviews? Judgment.

An effective review offers what the concert can’t: an extra-human perspective. By “extra-human,” I mean going beyond the experience of any one person, beyond the perspective of the reviewer and beyond the specific concert itself. - San Francisco Classical Voice

Meet Curtis’ Youngest New Student. She’s Seven

This year Curtis will have 13 musicians entering school under the age of 18. But even at a place known for prodigies, Olivia is unusual. She is believed to be the youngest student to study at Curtis since 1950, when 6-year-old violinist Diana Halprin matriculated. - Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)

“Six” To Close On Broadway After Five-Year Run

Attendance and grosses have fallen from the show’s early highs, with the show playing to 50- to 60-percent capacity this spring, but the production has seen a relatively long, healthy run on Broadway, as the 40th longest running show in its history. - The Hollywood Reporter

The Fake Experts That AI Keeps Citing

The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields. - 404 Media

Palestinian Artist Sliman Mansour, 79

In works that were by turns personal and political — vividly realistic and unsettlingly surreal — he captured and uplifted Palestinian life and history, creating art that served as a form of preservation as well as resistance. - Washington Post

Report: Women In UK Arts Say Discrimination Is Rampant

Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. - The Guardian

Another Study Of Violinists Sheds More Doubt On The 10,000-Hours-Of-Practice Idea

“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ is one of the most repeated ideas in popular writing about skill and success: put in 10,000 hours of practice, the story goes, and elite performance follows. … A 2019 study … redid the underlying comparison and found practice hours didn’t cleanly separate the best violinists from merely good ones.” - Science Blog

Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” - AP

Miss Piggy Is An Icon Of Feminism And Our Last Fabulous Movie Star

“She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West.” - Vulture (MSN)

How An Aging Actor With Dementia Does Samuel Beckett

One might argue that Beckett is the perfect playwright for an actor with that condition to perform — especially when the play is Krapp’s Last Tape, which Peter Marinker is preparing to do this week. Here’s how he, along with the director and crew at London’s Cockpit Theatre, are making it work. - BBC (MSN)

What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?

“The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” - The Guardian

Tiit Helimets Takes The Reins At Sacramento Ballet

The 49-year-old native of Estonia danced with San Francisco Ballet for 18 years, retiring as a principal in 2023. He spent over a decade applying for artistic director positions; now that he has one, he’s excited about almost every aspect of it, even the fundraising. - Pointe Magazine

Lindsay Clancy Admits She Strangled Her Children. Social Media Sleuths Won’t Stop Accusing Her Ex-Husband.

The only issue at the former obstetric nurse’s trial is whether she deliberately planned the killings (as prosecutors argue) or (as she claims) was in the grip of postpartum psychosis. Yet there’s a crop of true-crime fans on TikTok and other platforms who insist that Patrick Clancy is really the murderer. - Variety

Like It Or Not, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms Changed Visual Art

“She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged and the way the public engages with them.” - CNN (Yahoo!)

Yayoi Kusama Also Had A Career As A Serious Author

“(She) produc(ed) 12 novels, four volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories, and an autobiography between 1977 and 2002. … Kusama’s novels are dark, violent, and, in many cases, clearly informed by her decade in New York, no matter how emphatically she entreated readers to interpret them otherwise.” - Artnet

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