Author: Douglas McLennan

MONUMENT TO MUSIC

Frank Gehry’s swoopy droopy Experience Music Project (please don’t call it a museum) is opening soon in Seattle. Says Gehry: “This building is supposed to be a lot of fun. That’s what Paul Allen wanted. Fun. It’s supposed to be unusual. The (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum) in Cleveland wanted a straight-forward corporate look. Paul didn’t want that. He wanted what he called a swoopy building. Nobody has seen this before or will see it again. Nobody will build another one.” – Seattle Post-Intelligencer

PLANETARY SEQUEL

Colin Matthews’ new Pluto movement to finish up Holst’s “The Planets” finally gets a hearing. Though there’s no evidence Holst ever intended to write a “Pluto,” Matthews has completed the job. “Trying to replicate Holst’s musical style would have risked producing a feeble pastiche, so Matthews has composed as himself, yet he doffs his cap affectionately in some smaller respects.” – Financial Times

COMEBACK KID

In less than five years since Paul Kellogg has turned around the fortunes of New York City Opera. When he became the company’s artistic and general director in 1996, the company was $5 million debt, “had lost its sense of artistic direction and was coping emotionally with the death from AIDS of its previous director, the conductor Christopher Keene.” Now, in a miraculous turnaround, the debt is gone, and the company’s artistic purpose is clear. – New York Times

PIANO PRESTO

Renzo Piano just might be the world’s busiest architect: For Hermès he is designing a Far East headquarters in Tokyo. In America, he is working on the Harvard Art Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, an art campus in Atlanta and a sculpture gallery in Dallas. There is a telecom HQ in Rotterdam, a Paul Klee museum in Switzerland, a trio of new concert halls in Rome, an elegant tower in Sydney nearing completion, and a pilgrimage church in southern Italy which looks set to be the religious masterpiece of millennium year. In Berlin his Potsdamer Platz, a vast development spanning a blighted area on either side of the Wall, is nearly complete. – The Times (UK)

ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE

French intellectual Marc Fumaroli has very precise ideas about how our cultural history has gotten us to where we are. “Because I think that Renaissance is a continuity of antiquity, it is a rebirth, but at the same time it is a continuity. But with the French and the English at the end of the 17th Century, something new begins, and this novelty that has been acclaimed as a wonder, as a great period of Enlightenment, was perhaps full of the seeds of the Satanic elements that we have in this century, since spread in Europe and elsewhere.” – The Idler

AND THE AWARDS FOR VANITY GO TO…

The Israeli Theatre Prizes are being held for the fifth time. But the occasion has been marred by the directors of two leading Israeli theaters who are leading their theaters to boycott the awards, making any of the actors who work in those theaters ineligible for honors.  “Perhaps they mistakenly thought that the prize is meant for directors, rather than for artists.” – Haaretz (Israel)

OVERKILL

Someone took out an ad supporting National Ballet of Canada dancer Kimberly Glasco in her wrongful-dismissal fight against the dance company. But the inflammatory ad says “Glasco’s dismissal was not for artistic reasons and likens it to the dismissal in 1933 of leading Jewish artists in Nazi Germany.” That’s got The Canadian Jewish Congress upset. – CBC