The new Zagat guide rating culture has some flaws when it comes to classical music, says a letter writer to the New York Times. “Classical recordings, unlike those in other categories, are usually identified by at least three criteria: composer’s name, title of the work and performer’s name. In the Zagat guide, classical albums are typically listed alphabetically by composer name, perhaps followed by title, with little or no indication of performers. But a recording of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with Van Cliburn as soloist is listed under “V.” I suspect that this is a little joke. Or perhaps not.”
Month: December 2003
A New History Of Dance
A new history of dance in the 20th Century takes an unusual line for a history book. “Although everyone will be using the book for reference, Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick have produced a work that is completely unlike a standard reference book; you don’t just look things up in it — you read it. Here is a coherent, reasoned and entertaining chronicle of dance performance in the West over the hundred years that are unquestionably the fullest and most complicated in the long history of this fragmented and elusive art.”
What Happened To The “Angels” Effect?
Back in 1993, “Angeles in America” was a miraculous thing, and it promised a generation of new plays that would follow. But, writes Frank Rizzo, “the plays that followed, on Broadway at least, were largely more of what had come before: naturalistic or tiny-cast shows centering on family crises or issues of personal identity. They examined the characters as individuals; some were wonderfully done, but few explored who we are as a community, as a country and a member of the global village. They…furthered their canons but did not necessarily stretch their art. But nothing compared to our being touched by Angels.”
Movie Studios Losing Fight Against Piracy
Hollywood studios’ latest attempts to combat piracy seem to be a miserable failure. “A major source of movies online is an underground network of groups that specialize in bootlegging films, piracy experts say. These “ripping crews” – which recruit members around the world to obtain, edit, transfer and store films – compete with one another to be the first to obtain a movie, the experts say. They frequently are assisted by people connected to the movie industry, whose numbers include cinema employees, workers at post-production houses and friends of Academy members.”
The Problem(s) With Chicago Theatre
The hit musical “Urinetown” had its origins ten years ago in Chicago in a tiny storefront. But the show never got traction there, and it took a move to New York and a decade for the show to morph into a hit. “And yet had ‘Urinetown’ become a fringe Chicago musical – which it was inches away from becoming – it likely would have run here for a month and then sunk without a trace in a city that still seems woefully unable to propel its homegrown properties to national prominence and longevity – unless those artists involved ship out for the coasts and start all over.”
Labor Fight Tearing Up Touring Shows In America
“Labor strife is the most contentious dispute in touring theater today, a battleground that could create aesthetic and financial casualties for audiences as well as producers and presenters. Using non-Equity actors can greatly reduce a producer’s costs of putting a show on the road: Union actors in major productions earn $1,252 a week plus $742 in expense money, which covers lodging, meals and other incidentals of life on the road. Non-Equity producers generally don’t disclose their payroll figures, but the union asserts that non-union performers’ earnings hover around $500 a week, with an additional $250 for expenses.”
Iraqi Art In A Time Of War
“While bombs rip through buildings, rival factions assassinate each other’s leaders, and increasingly brutal occupation and resistance forces duke it out, Iraqi artists are playing it safe. This is in contrast to the art scene under sanctions, when poignant tableaux spoke of the suffering of a populace under siege, playwrights pushed the political envelope with veiled criticisms of the ancient regime’s corruption, and composers wrote angry orchestral anthems with damning titles like “To the U.N.” (which was, after all, the embargo enforcer).”
Interpret Away…(or not)
“Unlike sculpture, music is inevitably different in every manifestation,” writes David Patrick Stearns. “Whether huge or minute, those differences can be charted, albeit simplistically, on a continuum between two poles: objective to subjective in some parlance, classical to romantic in another. Is the conductor a conduit of the composer? Or a prism? Not everybody falls squarely into one of these camps, and when someone does, it’s not an everyday thing. Sometimes, the most freewheeling musician turns out to be anything but.”
Fenice Rises Again In Venice
“Like its namesake, the phoenix, La Fenice has finally risen from the ashes. The whole saga has resembled one of those long, tumultuous operas in which everything turns out more or less all right in the final act. Next Sunday, in the presence of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the Italian president, La Fenice reborn will open its doors. Yet even now, this is a reopening without opera.” There will be an opening week of concerts, and then the doors will “close again until Nov. 12, 2004, when Lorin Maazel will conduct a new production of “La Traviata.”
Kimmelman: Start Over With WTC Memorial
Michael Kimmelman believes that all the candidates for the WTC memorial ought to be thrown out. “This is in part a memorial to extreme bravery in the face of overwhelming force. Here’s a chance to be brave. We know you still haven’t presented your winning choice, which will no doubt be modified from the plans we now see. But don’t bother. Nothing short of extreme, last-ditch action has a chance of succeeding, because the process has been crucially flawed from the start. Instead of beginning with a firm idea about the meaning of the memorial, we started with a timetable. Instead of guaranteeing that the best artists and architects participated in the process, we pandered to the crowd.”