Black Culture Center Underway In Pittsburgh Ten years after planning began, Pittsburgh has broken ground on the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in the city's downtown district. "Actual construction begins next month and the center is supposed to open in early 2008... The center will contain a cafe, 500-seat theater, 4,000-square-foot exhibition space and additional education spaces."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/19/06 Posted: 10/19/2006 6:45 am
Could The Barnes Still Change Its Mind? Lee Rosenbaum says that the revelation that Pennsylvania lawmakers may have allocated money to move the Barnes collection to Philadelphia may be disappointing, but that it doesn't change the basic reality of the situation. "With all the fundraising and planning that have already gone into the Philly Barnes, It may be too late to effectuate any change in course... But big-money collectors ought to be sympathetic to the concept of honoring the memory and intentions of one of their own."
Culturegrrl (AJ Blogs) 10/18/06 Posted: 10/19/2006 6:25 am
SF Civic Art Collection Slipping Through The Bureaucratic Cracks The city of San Francisco is a major art collector, but you'd never know it by the way many of the pieces in the collection get treated. " San Francisco owns more than 3,000 pieces of art, acquired mainly through commissions and gifts and valued at about $30 million. But decades of poor record keeping and other factors have landed work by noted artists" in a dirty, wet basement room of a city hospital.
Chicago Tribune (AP) 10/19/06 Posted: 10/19/2006 6:17 am
Gehry Goes Underground In Philly Frank Gehry has signed on to design an expansion for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It will be entirely underground. "There is a kind of modesty thing. Most of us, we don’t set out to do the Bilbao effect, as it’s being called. It’d be a real challenge to do something that’s virtually hidden, that could become spectacular."
The New York Times 10/19/06 Posted: 10/18/2006 10:34 pm
NYCity Opera - What Might Have Been Plans for a new home for New York City Opera are done, even though the company probably won't get a chance to use them. Too bad, writes James Russell. "City Opera says it's still discussing a new home, but the task looks ever more formidable. The de Portzamparc effort makes it all too clear just what New York City is missing, and why the self-proclaimed world capital of culture has so much trouble nurturing it."
Bloomberg 10/18/06 Posted: 10/18/2006 10:02 pm
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Atlanta Hall On Hold Pending Future Donations Work on the Atlanta Symphony's proposed new concert hall in the city's downtown has come to a grinding halt as the project's CEO announced yet another reassessment of the location and design of the building. "Fund-raising for the new hall has stalled... Although the symphony has raised a third of the projected cost of the new center, officials have said they need another third to come from city and state government sources. To date, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and Gov. Sonny Perdue have yet to budget the ASO's request." Atlanta Journal-Constitution 10/19/06
Posted: 10/19/2006 5:56 am
Seattle Blowup Unlikely To Lead To Change At The Top The dustup over Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz has escalated into a full-scale brawl over the last few weeks, with some musicians loyal to Schwarz claiming harassment, and others in the orchestra insisting that the allegations are merely a reaction to a small, bullying cabal which is losing its grip on power at the SSO. But the bottom line hasn't changed: "Schwarz has lost some of the orchestra (just how large the disgruntled contingent is remains in dispute), but not all of it, and he appears to have the backing of the symphony's board. It may be uncomfortable for all involved, but as long as concertgoers like what they hear from the stage, internal unhappiness won't be an issue." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/19/06
Posted: 10/19/2006 5:44 am
Washington Opera Takes To The Mall The company will simulcast "Madame Butterfly" outside on the National Mall. "There's a central question here -- and it is not only a question in Washington but in New York and San Francisco and in all the great opera companies. Will these new technology initiatives raise revenue or is revenue not the primary goal? I believe that if we allow the next generation of young people greater access to the opera now -- through simulcasts, radio, special events, lower-priced tickets, free tickets and so on -- they are much more likely to support the opera later on." Washington Post 10/19/06
Posted: 10/18/2006 10:41 pm
Rudel Returns To City Opera Julius Rudel, 85, is back conducting at New York City Opera for the first time in 25 years. "Collective memory is short. So not everyone may remember what Mr. Rudel stood for during his tenure. Under him, City Opera cultivated a couple of generations of American singers: Samuel Ramey, Carol Vaness, and, of course, Beverly Sills, long the company’s reigning diva and ultimately Mr. Rudel’s successor." New York Times 10/19/06
Posted: 10/18/2006 10:24 pm
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She Said, They Said (And He's Dead) "The lead prosecutor in the recovered Glenn Gould artifacts case acknowledged yesterday that evidence demonstrating defendant Barbara Moore personally stole two documents that once belonged to the celebrated pianist and composer from Library and Archives Canada (LAC) 'is circumstantial.'" Prosecutors are seeking to prove that Moore lifted the items from the national archive when she worked there as a researcher in the 1980s. Moore maintains the items were a gift from her boss, who died in 1994. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/18/06
Posted: 10/19/2006 6:54 am
Bomb Scare Shuts San Francisco Concert Hall "The area around Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was cleared for about two hours [Wednesday] while the city police department's bomb squad investigated an odd- and suspicious-looking device on the sidewalk outside the building. The device — a yellow plastic tub about three feet long and one foot tall, with some clear liquid at the bottom and what appeared to be a bottle of bleach inside with a wire attached to a red blinking light — was determined to be harmless. There were no injuries or property damage." PlaybillArts 10/18/06
Posted: 10/19/2006 6:01 am
Ordway Center Breaks Even (With A Little Help) St. Paul's Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which serves as home base for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Minnesota Opera, as well as hosting traveling theatre productions, is officially in the black for the fourth year in a row, following years of fiscal struggle. However, the center had to take $1.7 million out of its endowment to break even. "The Ordway is mulling a joint campaign with its resident arts organizations... to create [a separate endowment] that would help to underwrite the cost of performances at the Ordway." St. Paul Pioneer Press 10/19/06
Posted: 10/19/2006 5:33 am
When "Real" News Won't Do, We Turn To Comedy "Surveys show that a high proportion of people aged 18 to 36 get most of their information about British politics from Have I Got News For You. In America, similar figures show that Jon Stewart's topical comedy The Daily Show supplies a high percentage of 18 to 36-year-old Americans with their main news fix. Why is comedy taking up so much space in our culture? Why is it so present, so dominant? There are things that should matter more - but at the moment they just aren't there." The Guardian (UK) 10/18/06
Posted: 10/18/2006 10:07 pm
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Overnight Sensation "Of all the characteristics which define Argentinian tenor Marcelo Alvarez, one shouts loudest: he had never been to an opera until he was 32... Within a year, he had made a celebrated operatic debut at La Fenice, Venice, the theatre which kickstarted the careers of Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti. Now 44, Alvarez ranks as a colossus of the operatic scene. How could all this have happened so quickly?" London Evening Standard (UK) 10/19/06
Posted: 10/19/2006 5:38 am
Robert Hughes Settles Some Scores Art critic Robert Hughes has written a memoir. "One object of this book is to settle a few scores with those who think like that. It's not the only one. The autobiographical narrative, an odyssey through the Bohemia of Sydney and London in the late 1950s and 1960s, breaks from time to time while Hughes delivers a vivid peroration on some subject close to his heart." The Telegraph (UK) 10/18/06
Posted: 10/18/2006 10:16 pm
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This Fall - Season Of Stars "To the great delight of retailers, autumn is packed with big-budget, name-brand writers, and winners have already begun to emerge, though there have been some crackups as well, and the climate has made it a particularly difficult season for lesser-known writers." The New York Times 10/19/06
Posted: 10/18/2006 10:31 pm
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Because We've Already Sued All The Pirates In America "The operator of a Russian Web site that sells music cheaply went on a media offensive to deny accusations that it violates copyrights on songs by major artists... AllofMP3.com typically charges under $1 for an entire album and just cents per track." The squabble could serve as an important battle in a U.S. effort to force Russia to crack down on intellectual property violations. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (AP) 10/19/06
Posted: 10/19/2006 6:43 am
Smiley: Public Radio Sound Is Same Old Same Old Why doesn't public radio attract more diverse audiences? Tavis Smiley says that "too often the networks and stations are going for the same look and sound, even if they have people of color in front of the camera or the microphone." Current 10/16/06
Posted: 10/18/2006 9:56 pm
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