Nina Ananiashvili is taking the US by storm on the Bolshoi’s current tour. After years of fighting for her artistic freedom, she’s now trying to juggle her “insane” perfectionism with a busy international career. – Los Angeles Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
EXPERTS FROM AFAR
Canada has turned out some first-rate writers, writers whose talent has been recognized internationally. But “Canadian society is incapable of making a book a ‘classic’; we cannot ‘elect,’ as it were, books of significance. As a society we are still excited by Anne of Green Gables.” So we let the Americans do it for us. – National Post (Canada)
THE CLASSICAL MUSIC COUNTERCULTURE
With major labels abandoning the classical music genre and alternative purchasing outlets such as the internet on the rise, a new counterculture of buyers of classical music recordings is growing. – Philadelphia Inquirer
MUSICAL REINFORCEMENTS
Los Angeles is known more for its entertainment than its arts. But Mark Swed writes that the recent appointments of dynamic conductors Kent Nagano and Grant Gershon to local music organizations (added to Esa-Pekka Salonen at the LA Phil) give some hope that LA might become a destination classical music city. – Los Angeles Times
ALL THAT JAZZ
At New York’s Columbus Circle a unique new music center is about to start construction. “Never before has a concert hall been conceived from the ground up for the distinctly American sound and style of jazz. During the entire century of its existence, it has been played in nightclubs, saloons and worse; it has been acoustically distorted in symphony halls designed for Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms rather than Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.” – Chicago Tribune
BEHIND THE TIMES
In Dallas, an arts fundraising organization that once raised $750,000 a year for the arts, and has given out $12 million in 35 years, comes up dry. Why? The biggest clue comes in the third paragraph of this story: “We went into this year with the same fund-raising plan that we had in 1986,” says board president Bill Semper. “This year the events stopped working.” – Dallas Morning News
GETTY DIRECTOR RESIGNS
John Walsh announced he will step down this fall after heading the J. Paul Getty Museum for 17 years, during which he broadened the Getty’s collections and oversaw the museum’s transition to its lavish new Brentwood home two years ago. Getty chief curator Deborah Gribbon will step into Walsh’s position in September. – New Jersey Online (AP)
FRENCH WAR MUSEUM OPENS
On Sunday, French President Jacques Chirac inaugurated France’s first museum dedicated to France’s role in World War II. The inauguration was held on the 60th anniversary of de Gaulle’s famous call to resist the occupying Nazis. – CNN (AP)
TAKING BACK THE WALL
The land where the Berlin Wall once stood has held out both a promise and caution for the future. Now an important new building opens. “Here, on a chunk of land where just 10 years ago there was nothing but empty space and buildings pockmarked with shrapnel, a city is being reborn -one that is a real place, not just a tourist quarter.” – Chicago Tribune
THE MORALITY OF PAINTINGS
You’re an art dealer or curator and you’re invited to someone’s house and discover an art treasure that the owner doesn’t know he has. Do you tell? The answer is a lot more complicated than simple yes or no, concludes author Michael Frayn. – The Telegraph (UK)