The Guild “is seeking permission in court to sell off a memorabilia collection – with an estimated value of more than $1 million – that includes a gold cigarette holder that belonged to the bass Ezio Pinza; a jeweled baton owned by the composer Richard Wagner; and a silver, ivory and diamond pen that was used by the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer.” But they’ll need a court’s permission to do it.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Alastair Macaulay Does An Exegesis Of The Sugar Plum Fairy
“People who’ve never been to any ballet, let alone The Nutcracker, have heard of her. Yet who is she? And why does she dance?”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.28.16
The common problem
I have a theory that you don’t become a full-fledged adult until you’ve weathered the death of someone with whom you are intimate, not in distant memory but at the actual moment of that person’s demise. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-11-28
Monday Recommendation: George Cables
George Cables, The George Cables Songbook (High Note) … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-28
Reconstructing The Soundscape Of 18th-Century Paris
“Archaeologist of sound” Mylène Pardoen: “The houses were very tall, so the sound stayed. It … sound remained there and seemed thicker than it would today. It was not louder, nor was it less loud. It was denser. There were more sounds that collided with one another.” (includes audio)
It’s Official: Pittsburgh Symphony Strike Is Over
The musicians are taking a sizable pay cut in the first year of the new contract’s five-year term, with salaries edging back upward later.
What Mark Rylance, Anne-Marie Duff, Simon Russell Beale, And Michael C. Hall Really Do Backstage
Rylance plays ping-pong; Beale runs through his entire part; Dominic Cooper east lots of cheese; Duff is too superstitious (and embarrassed) to tell us what she does.
Fifty Years Ago, Truman Capote’s Black And White Ball Was The Best Soirée Ever
“Before the Black and White Ball, no one had ever imagined, let alone attended, a formal party with a guest list so wildly catholic that it brought into one room the poet Marianne Moore and Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lionel Trilling, Lynda Bird Johnson and the Maharani of Jaipur, the Italian princess Luciana Pignatelli (wearing a 60-carat diamond borrowed from Harry Winston) and the documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles.”
The Great Passion Project Of Martin Scorsese’s Career Is About — A 17th-Century Jesuit In Japan? Why?
“He is known for his gangster pictures; he is a grandmaster of the profane. From the beginning, he has revealed himself to be an artist of intensely Catholic preoccupations, and the poisoned arrow of religious conflict runs straight through his career.”
‘An Antidote To Shame’: Garth Greenwell On James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room’
“Shame is one of the central subjects of Giovanni’s Room … But that’s not stating it strongly enough: the whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do. … That was the balm of the book when I first read it, the sense it gives that the tragedy it recounts is anything but inevitable.”
Swahili – How A Minor Zanzibar Dialect Became The Lingua Franca Of Half A Continent
An estimated 100 million people speak Swahili – more than French, Turkish, or Korean. And now enthusiasts are trying to spread use of the language all across Africa. (audio)