She was known particularly for her performances of Brünnhilde (including at Bayreuth) and Isolde (opposite Jon Vickers at the Met). She had to give up performing in 1991 when her retinas began to detach from the sheer force of the vibrations from her larynx.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Gainsborough Painting Back On View, Just Ten Days After Attack
“The much-loved 1785 painting, Mr and Mrs William Hallett (‘The Morning Walk’), received two scratches of about 1-metre and 65cm long in the incident, which happened on a busy Saturday afternoon.”
Another Principal Dancer Leaves Pennsylvania Ballet (But This Time, For A Happy Reason)
Amy Aldridge’s retirement evidently has nothing to do with the major personnel changes (and associated hard feelings) following the arrival of Ángel Corella as artistic director. She’s been dancing with the company for 23 seasons, 16 of them as a principal, and it’s time to retire.
Firestorm Erupts As Copenhagen Jazz Festival Turns Down Israeli Musician For ‘Political Reasons’
“In response to asking whether it was possible for his jazz band to attend the festival, the Israeli musician Alon Farber was informed that Copenhagen Jazz Festival did not accept Israeli musicians due to ‘political reasons’.” Farber posted this on Facebook, word got around the internet, Copenhagen’s deputy mayor demanded an explanation and made noises about city funding – and the festival’s director is claiming that this is all due to a misunderstanding of what he meant by “political.”
Philadelphia’s Old Metropolitan Opera House To Reopen (Though Not For Opera)
The 4,000-seat theater was built in 1908 by Oscar Hammerstein I (grandfather of the Broadway lyricist) on what is now a gentrifying section of North Broad Street; it served as a cinema, ballroom, circus, and church before being abandoned a number of years ago. Now a real estate developer is renovating the Met and has signed Live Nation to operate it as a performance venue.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.28.17
Doin’ It
After almost two generations of declining emphasis on the arts in public schools we face communities largely made up of people who have little or no experience participating in the arts. Where once large percentages … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-03-28
“Emet” & Emmett: Why Truth-Telling (like Schutz’s) about Till’s Murder Should Be Ecumenical
The Whitney Museum has now composed what is, to my mind, the most succinct, sagacious response to the firestorm of castigation, pontification and rationalization swirling around Dana Schutz‘s powerful Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-03-28
Oregon’s Troubled Eugene Opera Parts Ways With Its General Director
In January the company cancelled the second half of its current season after racking up $200,000 in debt. General director Mark Beudert lives in Indiana and ran Eugene Opera on a part-time basis – a situation about which the board chair said, “We’ve just reached a stage where that as a model is not going to work for us.”
An Industrial Hellscape On A Giant, Round Conveyor Belt: ‘The Hairy Ape’ At The Armory
Erik Piepenburg visits Stewart Laing, designer of the enormous, glaringly colored sets that revolve around the audience in director Richard Jones’s revival of the Eugene O’Neill play.
Why John Leguizamo Writes Scripts For Himself
“It got so demoralizing. I’d gone to NYU and I’d trained with some of the great acting teachers and I was constantly doing Murderer No. 2 or Janitor No. 3 and it was just like, ‘Am I always going to have a number next to my name?'”
Actress Playing ‘Malvolia’ Hits Back At Telegraph Column Arguing Actresses Should ‘Get Their Mitts Off Male Actors’ Parts!’
Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish used the current National Theatre production of Twelfth Night, which features Tamsin Greig as a female Malvolio, as a jumping-off point for a column suggesting that gender-reversed casting is becoming entrenched and that actresses – and theatres – should spend energy finding and developing female equivalents to the roles of, say, Hamlet or Willy Loman. Now Greig has responded, saying not only that Cavendish used “slightly unenlightened vocabulary,” but also that “he would not have dared to say anything if it had been a black man playing Malvolio.”