Month: April 2000

PODIUM DANCING

The New York Philharmonic has decided it wants Riccardo Muti as its next music director. But even though the Philharmonic’s wishes have become public, it isn’t at all certain yet that the Italian maestro is sure he really wants, or needs, the podium that Kurt Masur plans to vacate in 2002. “Although orchestra officials deny that terms have even been discussed, rumors abound that Muti is holding out for a salary of $2 million and an annual residency of six weeks. “What [Muti] is doing, like the clever negotiator he is, is playing hardball,” says a highly placed executive in the music business who knows all parties in the negotiations.” – Chicago Tribune

RATTLED

The Berlin Philharmonic has been counting on Simon Rattle, its new music director, to infuse new life into the orchestra. But the conductor’s recipe for doing that has some a little nervous. “Rattle has made it clear that the Berliners will be lucky to get Brahms once a year, and should be thinking more in terms of Adès and Turnage. He told a German publication that the orchestra plays beautifully ‘but also very loudly’; that it will have to start justifying its annual subsidy; that it should stop turning its nose up at crossover music; that it should spend more time in Germany, instead of trying to be the touring orchestra with the best Tchaikovsky Fifth; that it can no longer expect people to roll up at its doors in time-honoured fashion.” – Financial Times

SOMETIMES A CIGAR…

Sigmund Freud continues to loom over the landscape of our modern culture. “My bottom line is that any trip to a movie theater, any conversation with someone at work, seems to make clear that the influence, the impact, of Freud is still alive and well in the year 2000. In spite of the fact that most people have no idea that he is humming so loudly in the background of everything from their ‘pickup lines’ to their talk about the weather, the 21st century begins as one in which we know a cigar is never just a cigar, and that’s an important thing to know.” – Christian Science Monitor

EARLY WITHDRAWAL

The faxes started coming in to Australia’s arts groups – their biggest patron was pulling out. So the rumors were true. Richard Pratt, “generally acknowledged as Australia’s second wealthiest man, is used to doing what he wants with his money, including the estimated $10 million-plus he is thought to have directly handed over to Melbourne-based performing arts organisations in less than a decade. However, along with the generosity came an interventionist approach that ruffled feathers.” – Sydney Morning Herald

SPECIAL STUDIES?

Chinese film actress Gong Li wants to enroll at Beijing University as a social studies researcher. But the university’s website “has been flooded with hate mail, saying that should the star of such critically-acclaimed movies as ‘Farewell My Concubine’ and ‘Raise The Red Lantern’ be accepted, it would be because of her fame and good looks. Others wrote in to say the university should ‘hang its head in shame’ if her application was successful. – The Straits Times (Singapore)

REMEMBERING MERRICK

Producer David Merrick, who died this week, was a producer to be reckoned with.  “Merrick is the Bermuda Triangle in a Brooks Brothers suit. He lures writers and playwrights in like naval air squadrons, never to be seen or heard from again,” said the writer and comic Stan Freberg, a survivor of a Merrick flirtation with one of his plays. – Washington Post

A CRUSHING BLOW

Porters at Sotheby’s London mistakenly put a crate containing a £100,000 Lucien Freud painting arriving for a sale into the trash, where it was hauled away and crushed in a machine. The mistake was not, Sotheby’s officials hasten to explain, a comment by the porters on the artwork. – The Independent (UK)

IDENTITY CRISIS

Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project, soon to open in Seattle is one of a new generation of experiential museums “characterized by a sometimes brash and loopy mix of commercialism and high-tech exhibition space. These facilities often “celebrate not the past but the present of American popular culture: from Virginia’s Newseum to the Grateful Dead’s prospective Terrapin Station in San Francisco, from numerous science museums such as the Museum of Innovation in San Jose to the various halls of fame. The new museums are sometimes more akin to dazzling amusement arcades or electronic playgrounds than to the somber and solidly physical dignities of the Met. Visitors are called upon to play, participate, and buy, rather than contemplate. Some curators, indeed, question whether they are really museums at all and not entertainment complexes with a loose educational veneer. – Metropolis

WHAT TO DO…

Hollywood heavyweights from a variety of disciplines, from film’s Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee to television’s Gary David Goldberg, are being invited to what’s being called the PBS Summit on Creativity and Community. They’ll be asked for ideas about what the noncommercial broadcaster ought to be doing. “We’re looking at a media landscape that’s going to change dramatically in the next five years, and public television and its member stations really need to look at some new ideas,” says new PBS president Pat Mitchell. “We need an infusion of outside thinking.” – Los Angeles Times 04/28/00