Month: April 2004

A 12-Year-Old Genius Of The Piano

Kit Armstrong is 12 years old, the youngest student at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He’s also, according to his teachers, a musical genius of the kind that comes along once in a lifetime. “Have you heard about this kid named Kit Armstrong?” is the question of the moment in the small international community of impresarios who decide which artists land recitals in leading venues and perform with orchestras. His name is already circulating in the wider entertainment industry. He’s been on David Letterman, and handlers are busy fielding his many media requests.”

30 Seconds With Dame Judi

Dame Judi Dench is one of England’s most distinguished actors. “She’s a peculiarly British heroine. An underdog. Dench is short and a little dumpy and not obviously glamorous. And yet she can transcend her given lot to become beautiful and heroic. In polls, she is regularly voted Britain’s best-dressed woman, Britain’s most admired woman (she recently beat the Queen down to number two), the woman we would most like to be.”

A Lincoln Center Plan That’s “Evolutionary”

After years of debate, finally a plan for a Lincoln Center makeover that works. “What we’ve got here is the inverse of the Wow Factor: a new plan for the center’s public spaces so understated as to seem almost uncanny. It looks just like Lincoln Center, only smarter, more self-aware and amazingly confident in its sense of direction. The plan is evolutionary. It tweaks, here and there, the existing architecture of Lincoln Center, but the overall effect is to enhance the original rather than to negate or override it. It’s respectful. This seems to me an invaluable civic lesson at this intemperate moment in our national life.”

California City Funds Plan To Lure Artists

The city of Ventura, California has become so expensive to live in that artists moved out. So “last week, the city gave Minneapolis-based Artspace Projects Inc. $400,000 to begin work on a plan to provide homes and studios to at least 25 artists and their families. The company, which specializes in carving airy lofts out of abandoned industrial buildings, aims to raise at least $10 million, mostly from state and federal agencies and private foundations.”

Portland’s New Theatre Project Draws Critics

Portland Center Stage is getting a new, state-of-the-art home, one that will “put its facilities on a par with the country’s best regional theater venues in such cities as Chicago, Minneapolis and Dallas. It also will bring back to life one of the city’s oldest buildings, the 1891 Oregon National Guard Armory at Northwest Davis Street and 10th Avenue. And it is vying to be the most ecologically sound building so far completed in the Northwest. Sounds pretty good. What’s not to like?” So why so many critics of the project?

Jumbling Up Culture (Whatever You Want To Call It)

How is it that “high” culture and pop culture separated so thoroughly? “I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more.”