“[Dante] created such a compelling portrait of undying love that [they] went down in Western cultural history … They have inspired symphonic tone poems by Tchaikovsky and others, paintings by artists such as everyone from Botticelli to Ingres to Dante Gabriel Rosetti, no fewer than three sculptures by Rodin, including his famous The Kiss – and more than 18 operas.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Sondheim OKs A Hard Rock Version Of “Sweeney Todd”
Washington, D.C.’s Landless Theatre Company managed to persuade the famously exacting composer to approve a prog-metal arrangement of the <em>Sweeney</em> score for electric guitar and keyboards, bass and drums. Auditions for this version were “not traditional in any sense.”
Mining The Sondheimisphere For Sondheimiana
Nelson Pressley has scoured the Great Man’s writings and interviews to provide “a primer on some of the talismans, techniques and tallies.” Favorite tool? Clement Wood’s rhyming dictionary. Favorite therapy for bad reviews? Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective. Favorite of his own shows? (You’ll have to click through for that one.)
The Giant North Korean Monument In Senegal Is Even Weirder Than You’d Think
It’s not just that an enormous piece (half again the size of the Statue of Liberty) of Socialist Realism (in 2010? Really?) made in Pyongyang got plopped down in Dakar. Look at the money involved (and not involved) and things get really bizarre.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.04.14
Chicago Has Some Fun Marketing Magritte
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-08-04
While We’re On the Subject of Marketing
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-08-05
The Downside of Freelance Nation
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-08-04
Getting to know him
(Terry Teachout on discovering, later in life, just how “relatable” Shakespeare really is)
AJBlog: About Last Night | Published 2014-08-04
Just because: Jonathan Winters improvises
AJBlog: About Last Night | Published 2014-08-04
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Met Opera Postpones Contract Deadline One Week For Financial Analysis
“The Metropolitan Opera and two of its unions have agreed to hire an independent financial analyst to assess the company’s finances, postponing a threatened lockout by another week, officials said Saturday. The deal was brokered by a federal mediator who arrived Thursday to jump-start fractious talks.”
Just Who Are The 15 Unions Negotiating Contracts With The Met Opera?
“About 2,400 of the Met’s 3,400 employees are union members. They cover a broad swath of activities ranging from singing in the chorus, playing in the orchestra, dancing, painting sets, running the box office, singing solo roles, working in the call center, posting bills (advertising posters), running cameras and taking tickets.”
How Sotheby’s And Christie’s Locate New People To Spend Massive Sums Of Money On Art
“If you’re even remotely curious about starting a blue-chip art collection, there’s a good chance the world’s biggest auction houses already know who you are, and exactly how much you might spend to own a masterpiece. … They’ve dispatched armies of experts to identify potential bigwigs, and satisfy their ever-expanding art whims.”
ABT’s Misty Copeland Is Now A Major Underwear Spokesmodel
“[Copeland] will become the new face of Under Armour’s ‘I Will What I Want’ campaign, which focuses on the apparel giant’s women’s business. To appreciate Under Armour’s out-of-the-box thinking in tapping a ballerina to front its national ads, one has to grasp the complexity of Copeland’s story.”
Dick Smith, Hollywood’s Master Of Makeup, Dead At 92
“As the grandmaster of special-effects makeup, Dick Smith broke ground in the movies in the early 1970s when he transformed Dustin Hoffman into a 120-year-old for Little Big Man and an adolescent Linda Blair into a diabolical demon [sic] in The Exorcist. When he received an Academy Award in 1985 for aging F. Murray Abraham into an elderly composer in the film Amadeus, many industry observers wondered: What took so long?”