An Evening At The Theatre? Let Me Just Grab My Flip-Flops... "What is it about dressing up that sophisticated people now find so off-putting? And who needs guests showing up at Halloween parties who are too cool or smug to bother wearing anything but black? Black is not a costume. It’s a downer. Say what you want about Marie Antoinette. At least she made an effort." The New York Times 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:31 am
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The Museum Of Light And Beauty Paris's newly restored Musée des Arts is a far cry from the dark, dingy place it used to be. "Radical decisions were made, bold steps were taken. While architects worked out how to open up the space, bringing in light and air, a team of curators settled down to choose the best 6,000 objects to put on permanent display... The result is a collection that positively shines with its own good fortune."
The Telegraph (UK) 10/21/06 Posted: 10/22/2006 10:38 am
Who Will Prop Up Canada's Homegrown Art Market? When Canadian über-collector Kenneth Thomson died last spring, it marked the end of an era for Canada. Now, many are wondering who will step in to fill Thomson's considerable void. "Buyers and dealers speculate about what will happen to the structure of the market with the removal of one of its pillars... No dealer is going to risk offending clients by naming them or telling them more is demanded of them. But while big fish prefer to move under the water, they cannot help but leave ripples in their wake."
The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/21/06 Posted: 10/22/2006 10:31 am
Decorating The City Public art is suddenly the hottest thing on Toronto's cultural scene. "Long forgotten are the political battles of the '60s that confronted the installation of Henry Moore's The Archer in Nathan Phillips Square. In such a media-intense city as we are now, a public display of significant contemporary art is seen as an innovative and necessary way to ornament existing urban space. And unlike the oversized bronze statues of a century ago, you don't necessarily need space on the ground, either."
Toronto Star 10/21/06 Posted: 10/22/2006 9:12 am
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Eschenbach, Philly Parting Ways In a move that stunned the music world, the Philadelphia Orchestra has announced that music director Christoph Eschenbach will leave his post when his contract expires after the 2007-08 season. At five years, Eschenbach's aborted tenure in Philadelphia will rank as the shortest any music director there has ever had. Philadelphia Inquirer 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 11:59 am
- So, What Now? "The successor scenario remains unclear, and the rest of the Eschenbach tenure - almost two full seasons - could go to a number of extremes: Conductor and orchestra might just give up on each other, which would be painful and/or soporific, or they might decide that since it's not a marriage anymore, they can relax and have fun. [As for a successor,] the orchestra will have a long, hard slog with dark horses eager to come up, veterans such as [Bernard] Haitink who guard their time jealously, and interested parties in between - all arriving here knowing that the orchestra needs them more than they need it." Philadelphia Inquirer 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 11:58 am
And This Is... Bad? Anthony Tommasini says that the opera world is suffering from a distinct lack of big voices capable of tackling the classic roles in big Italian operas. "Young voices are not being nurtured for this particular repertory as they once were. Instead, fledgling singers have the option of forging a distinctive artistic persona in the much broader repertory that has been embraced by companies everywhere." The New York Times 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 10:03 am
A Necessity, Not A Frill Is a musical education as important in child development as proper instruction in math and language? "At a superficial level, most teachers would agree that becoming involved with music at school has a markedly good effect on pupils. [But] more significant is the nature of the music itself. Nobody can deny how central a part music plays in the life of most children and adolescents... It is the purpose of education to extend the imagination, to open up new and infinite pleasures. For many children, to learn an instrument is the beginning of this extension." The Observer (UK) 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:48 am
Lyric Back On The Air And Fully Funded Lyric Opera of Chicago has found a sponsor for its radio broadcasts through the 2011-12 season. Lyric has been off the air for four years, but returns to local and syndicated radio this Saturday night. The donor making the series possible is a Chicago-area developer whose net worth is estimated at $3 billion. Chicago Tribune 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:42 am
And Some Opera Singers Look A Lot Like An Offensive Line Most people in the arts assume that there just isn't a lot of crossover between the core audiences for high culture and professional sports. But honestly, football really isn't all that different from opera, right? ...no, really! "The crowd is better behaved at the opera, [but] there are moments watching both that make my spine tingle... Second-guessing plays a big role in both the football and opera experiences. By halftime of the game or intermission of the opera, almost everybody has become a critic." Baltimore Sun 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:37 am
Alabama Exec Resigns The executive director of the Alabama Symphony has resigned after only three seasons. Paul Ferrone's brief tenure in Birmingham was widely considered a success - "he leaves an orchestra with a balanced budget, a new music director and a growing statewide presence" - and it appears that the decision to leave was entirely his. Birmingham News (AL) 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:11 am
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Living The Starbucks Lifestyle Admit it: you smirked when you first read that Starbucks was going to start cross-promoting movies, music, and books alongside its $6 lattes. That's okay - they expected the ridicule. "Yet the chain is increasingly positioning itself as a purveyor of premium-blend culture... [and] the more cultural products with which Starbucks affiliates itself, the more clearly a Starbucks aesthetic comes into view: the image the chain is trying to cultivate and the way it thinks it’s reflecting its consumer. The New York Times 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:58 am
Culture City, Florida? (Not Yet.) Conventional wisdom has long held that serious culture doesn't stand a chance in Miami, a city known mainly for its miles of beaches and hard-partying tropical atmosphere. With the opening of a massive new performing arts center, that wisdom is being challenged like never before. But will the city's ambitious cultural plans be enough to convince its residents to take in a play, or an orchestra concert? "Miami, after all, is the city that lost its symphony orchestra, the Florida Philharmonic, only three years ago. An ambitious new design district has yet to generate significant street life. And sun town still isn't much of a theatre town." Toronto Star 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:19 am
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The Composer As Intellectual Populist There may not be a more iconic composer of our era than Osvaldo Golijov, whose works have become some of the most sought after in the classical music world. "As impressive as the level of success Golijov has achieved is how he has done it. The composer, who teaches at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., has managed to create works that are uncompromisingly sophisticated yet speak to listeners with little or no classical background." Denver Post 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:42 am
Rostropovich Not Going Back To D.C. Cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich has canceled his upcoming appearance with the National Symphony, an orchestra he led for 17 seasons, saying that doctors have ordered him to remain in Russia while he undergoes tests. Rostropovich was to have conducted an ambitious two week mini-festival celebrating the centenary of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Washington Post 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:14 am
Laughing At Herself (And The Rest Of Us) "Anna Russell, 94, who spoofed and honored the worlds of opera and classical music with her comic yet knowledgeable musical parodies, died Oct. 18 at her home in Batemans Bay, Australia... Miss Russell became a beloved figure for her knowing satires of musical techniques, pretentious singers and, perhaps most memorably, the operas of Richard Wagner." Washington Post 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:06 am
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The Invisible Hand Every actor dreams of directing, but most theatregoers are blissfully unaware of exactly what it is that a director brings to a production. "If she's lucky, theatergoers meeting her will say something vague, such as that they enjoyed the show. If a director is doing her job, her contribution may be undetectable, like the eggs in a cake. The finished product wouldn't be nearly as delectable if the yolks had been left out, but you're darned if you can single out their presence." Baltimore Sun 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:30 am
Reality Theatre "With an election imminent, political theater is everywhere in New York. Some of it is broad and partisan, [and] some of it is more subtle, aiming at issues rather than personalities. Some of it even aspires to be work you could stand to watch years from now, when the current administration and its troubles are in the history books." The New York Times 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:00 am
Pinter's Last Hurrah A new production of Samuel Beckett's play, Krapp's Last Tape, starring an unmistakably weak and ailing Harold Pinter "has been hailed by British reviewers both as a triumphant final hurrah for Mr. Pinter and as a lean and compelling performance by an actor-playwright whose own plays draw heavily on broken language, pauses, silence... Mr. Pinter is now 76, and has battled cancer of the esophagus. He said last year that he would not write any more plays, so there was an inevitable sense of valediction." The New York Times 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 8:53 am
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Blynded By The Ivory Towers? Last week, the University of Minnesota announced with much fanfare that it would pay $750,000 to acquire the personal archive of author Robert Bly. But at least one observer says the acquisition is yet another example of academia's disconnect from truly good writing. "The literature and creative writing departments of our universities deserve a lot of the blame for this. For decades now, they’ve lavished praise and professorships on authors who dress up tedium with tortured syntax and mystical posturing, the sort who — like Bly — promulge the stereotype that contemporary literature is a pursuit suited only for pseudo-intellectuals in silly vests who go into raptures at the prospect of yet another eight page description of a snowy day." The Insomnia Report 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:15 am
The Coming Wave Of Chinese Novels China's publishing industry is expanding at a startling rate, and "many consider the greatest loophole in Chinese-English publishing efforts to be contemporary Chinese voices in English." As such, Western publishers are lining up to translate the works of China's top young writers. San Francisco Chronicle 10/21/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:04 am
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TV Gets Its GOP On There are some strange and unfamiliar characters in some of this fall's new primetime TV series. Careful research has revealed that these characters - previously seen in Hollywood only as cartoonish foils and token presences - are called "Republicans." Some of them are even called "Christian conservatives," and it is fascinating to watch as their liberal creators attempt to flesh them out. Boston Globe 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 10:22 am
Whose Movie Is It, Anyway? (And Why Do We Care?) Filmmaking is an innately collaborative process, so it isn't surprising that disputes frequently crop up over who really "owns" the creative process behind a film. But an ongoing dustup over the auteurship of the new film Babel is drawing a lot of attention, even outside the navel-gazing film world. The New York Times 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 10:08 am
The iPod Revolution: Five Years And Still Going Strong It was five years ago this weekend that Apple unveiled the iPod, and CEO Steve Jobs made a bold prediction that the sleek white gadget would change the world. It took a year for a million iPods to be sold, but ever since then, the device has been the centerpiece of "a revolution that has helped topple the idea that record labels, studios and broadcasters should set the terms for how and when you entertain yourself." Los Angeles Times 10/22/06
Posted: 10/22/2006 9:38 am
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