The Mountain Dance Trail project, run out of Davis & Elkins College, “has helped organize dances across the state, cultivating tradition county by county. With a nod to the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky and the Crooked Road music trail in Virginia, it is a homegrown effort to revive and brand a West Virginia legacy.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Calls For Int’l Boycott Of Malaysian Philharmonic Following Musicians’ Firing
“An international musicians’ group has called for a global boycott of recruitment by the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), saying the symphony sacked nine members without cause. The Paris-based International Federation of Musicians (IFM) posted on its website a strongly-worded attack on the sackings, in a rare note of discord in the usually genteel world of symphony music.”
Long-Lost Raphael Discovered In Bank Vault
“Portrait of a Young Man, around 1513-1514, from the Czartoryski family collection in Krakow, was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939 for Hitler’s Führermuseum, Linz. It disappeared in 1945 shortly before the end of the Second World War.” Polish authorities won’t say where it was found, except that it is “in a region of the world where the law favours us.”
Ex-Bayreuth Baritone Now Insists He Never Had Swastika Tattoo
“The Russian bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, who resigned from the Bayreuth Festival over body art, wants his American audience to know his side: What appeared to be a swastika tattooed on his chest was just the first stage of a star with a heraldic crest.”
Shakespeare’s First Folio To Be Scanned, Posted On Web
The Bodleian Library’s copy, still in its original binding, is being stabilized by conservators so that it can be photographed; a £20,000 appeal has begun to cover the costs of preservation, digitizing the photographs and posting them online.
One Of Warsaw’s Top Theatres Struggles With Slashed Budget
“When Katarzyna Szustow, head of communications for the Dramatyczny Theatre, was asked about its financial situation, she replied with a single word: tragic. The theatre has been operating since 1949. But in the five years since Szustow joined, the budget, dependent on subsidies from city authorities, has shrunk 30%.”
River Phoenix’s Final Film To Premiere 19 Years After His Death
“Dutch director George Sluizer has finally finished Dark Blood, the movie actor River Phoenix was working on when he died at age 23 of a heart attack on Halloween night 1993 … Sluizer will present the film for the first time at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht in September.”
$5Million To Study Immortality
“Millions of people fervently believe in an afterlife. John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, is not one of them. But Mr. Fischer does see the subject as ripe for academic research, and on Tuesday the John Templeton Foundation awarded him a windfall to make that happen – $5-million for a multidisciplinary investigation of human immortality.”
Crowd-Funding A CD Of Elizabeth Bishop Poems Set To Music
“For the versatile Suzie LeBlanc, financial necessity’s invention has proved to be a strangely welcome change. … The Canadian singer is seeking $60,000 to record newly commissioned settings of poems by Elizabeth Bishop.”
Meet The Real Girl From Ipanema, Age 50 And Still Tall, Tanned And Lovely
“In the early 1960s, a 17-year-old girl called Helô Pinheiro would walk past the Veloso bar on the beachfront of Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, every day. She was ‘tall and tanned and young and lovely’ – and she was regaled by the men who drank there.”