“The Sibelius Academy has some features that are unique in the world,” says Jasper Parrott, a leading artist agent in London who regularly visits leading conservatories to watch emerging talent. “It offers opportunities to work with an orchestra, its own very competent student orchestra. And thanks to Finland’s abundance of good orchestras, Sibelius Academy conducting students get professional opportunities even before they graduate.”
Month: July 2016
Appointment Of New Director At Berlin’s Volksbühne Has Some People Panicking About The Entire Direction Of The City
The city government’s choice of Tate Modern art msueum director Chris Dercon for the job “has laid bare long-simmering worries about the direction of Berlin’s arts scene. … Critics say that officials are forsaking an artistic tradition of locally produced, politically and aesthetically unconventional programming. Instead, they see an effort to redraw the theater’s mission to make Berlin a more attractive and marketable destination for tourists and for the internationally minded millennials who have moved into many of that city’s trendiest districts.”
How Screen Culture Is Killing Dance (But Maybe Not)
“This new normal wherein everyone carries a small screen with them everywhere starts to have a grim, dystopic cast to it. It’s largely responsible for the loss of casual contact with the unfamiliar and the weird, with that which we did not choose, and—more to the point of my pet project—it doesn’t help bring anyone into contact with dance who wasn’t already interested in it. But then, surprisingly, it does; the screen also emerges as a vehicle that can introduce casual viewers to concert dance.”
Syrian Refugees’ Adaptation Of ‘The Trojan Women’ Arrives In Brexiting Britain
“The play Queens of Syria is a chance to put a human face on the worst humanitarian disaster since the second world war. … The play, directed by Zoe Lafferty, has changed over time as the cast has shrunk to 13 women” – from up to 50 during the original workshops in the Suyrian refugee community in Amman – “and personal circumstances have moved on.”
Progress: Number Of Nonwhites Working In The Arts In Britain Up By 59% In Past Five Years
“Around 19,000 [black, Asian and minority ethnic] workers were employed in music and the performing and visual arts in 2015, compared to 12,000 in 2011 – a bigger change than in the wider creative industries (44%). Despite the surge, the 2015 figures means just 6.6% of all those in music and the performing and visual arts were black, Asian or from an ethnic minority, compared with 11.3% of those in the UK economy as a whole.”
Remembering The Struggle To Desegregate America’s Public Libraries
“Long before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which included libraries as institutions where desegregation was mandated but did not name them specifically – the national NAACP and chapters had launched small campaigns that did everything from championing the cause of a Black librarian assistant’s promotion in the New York Public Library system or, in this case, investigating Violet Wallach’s allegations about her [New Jersey] hometown library.”
Yves Bonnefoy, 93, France’s Great Modern Poet And Translator Of Shakespeare
“By 1978, when his collected poems were published, Mr. Bonnefoy’s position as France’s most important poet, and one if its most influential men of letters, was secure.” In addition, “over the years, he translated 15 of [Shakespeare’s] plays, all of the sonnets, and wrote extensively on Shakespeare’s poetics. His translations of Yeats are equally well known in France.”
Should We Archive The Tweets And Social-Media Profiles Of Famous Artists For Posterity, The Way We Save Their Letters And Diaries?
“If journals, sketchbooks, letters, and scribbled-on napkins are venerated and kept for insights into great minds, there seems to be a case that tweets should be held onto, too. Then again, publicly accessible 140-character bursts can be so frivolous – and based so much on maintaining appearances – that they might seem like they don’t offer anything worth preserving.”
Two Rembrandts In One Guy’s Bedroom, And How They Ended Up At The Rijksmuseum
That guy was Éric de Rothschild, and “until now, [he] has never spoken publicly about the sale of the paintings last year to the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre for 160 million euros … in an unusual joint purchase that was arranged between the Dutch and French governments.”
Danish Museum Acknowledges Its Italian Antiquities Were Looted And Returns Them
“It took years of often tense negotiations, but on Tuesday the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen signed an agreement that includes the return of archaeological artifacts that Italy said had been looted from Italian soil.”