Month: March 2006

Conductors On The Run

The past week saw two major music directors – Boston’s James Levine and the London Phil’s Kurt Masur – fall ill on the eve of a major tour. In both cases, podium replacements were quickly named, and the tours went ahead. But what about those substitute conductors? Were they just sitting around waiting for something to do? Not a chance – Marek Janowski, who stepped in for Levine, was in the middle of a two-week conducting stint in Minneapolis when he was asked to make a one-day, 3000-mile detour to conduct one of the most difficult programs imaginable at Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s own hometown conductor, Osmo Vänskä, scrambled to reach Southern California to take over Masur’s duties.

Feds Channel Millions To NYC Cultural Rebuilding

More than $27 million in federal grants intended to revitalize New York’s downtown district were announced yesterday. Among the organizations benefitting from the new influx of cash will be the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Flea Theater and the National Museum of the American Indian. “Some downtown arts groups have repeatedly expressed frustration over the time it has taken for the development corporation to make good on its 2002 pledge to help cultural institutions downtown. Yesterday, their leaders just sounded grateful.”

Hollywood Hates Your Homebrew PVR

Ever since TiVo took over the American television landscape, there has been an explosion of homemade versions of the personal video recorder that do most of the same things TiVo can do, but cheaper, and without a monthly subscription. However, a new round of “digital rights management” legislation threatens to make all but the “official” recorders obsolete, and Hollywood is pushing hard for passage.

Architecture Isn’t The Kimmel’s Real Problem

Peter Dobrin says that the settlement between the Kimmel Center and architect Rafael Viñoly is filled with elements of “pure fantasy” that don’t begin to hold up under scrutiny. “It is a stunning fantasy to call the Kimmel Center a wonderful civic space. It could be a wonderful civic space. Nothing in the architecture prevents it from becoming one. But in its current state, there’s nothing wonderfully civic about the center’s gorgeous, oft-deserted rooftop garden and ground-level plaza… The Kimmel won’t be done until it has an appropriate amount of money – that is, an endowment – to make it fully come alive.”

Baltimore In Trouble

The Baltimore Symphony ran a staggering deficit of $7.3 million in fiscal 2005, and expects to tally another $4.5 million in red ink this season, raising the organization’s accumulated debt total to a whopping $16.2 million. The numbers represent some of the largest deficits of any American orchestra in the last decade, even though Baltimore’s annual budget ($30 million) is considerably smaller than those of orchestras in Cleveland and Chicago, which have faced similar-sized deficits in recent years. Oh, and the musicians’ contract, which already included financial concessions meant to reduce debt, expires this September.

Trailblazing Director Dies

Photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, who broke down racial barriers throughout his career, has died at 93. “He was the first black person to work at Life magazine and Vogue, and the first to write, direct and score a Hollywood film, The Learning Tree (1969), which was based on a 1963 novel he wrote about his life as a farm boy in Kansas. He also was the director of the 1971 hit movie Shaft, which opened the way for a host of other black-oriented films.”

The Dancing Computer

Microsoft is showing off a computer interface that is controlled by dancing in front of it. “The dance pad has designated arrows and buttons that are normally used to correspond to beats in the game, but for Microsofts system it will be used to navigate and scroll through a wide variety of applications.”