“The French Canadian [maestro], 48, … has renewed his contract as music director of the New Jersey Symphony through the 2015-16 season. He has been in that post since 2010.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Frances Alenikoff, 91, Grandmother Of Multimedia Dance
“[She] an active participant in the artistic ferment in and around the lofts of SoHo at midcentury and afterward. By the 1950s her work had begun to take on aspects of what would now be called multimedia performance, employing slides and chanting to add color and meter to the dance.” She founded and ran two companies and continued performing into her 80s.
Remembering Woody Guthrie At 100
“Although ‘This Land is Your Land,’ is Guthrie’s most famous song, he is also responsible for thousands of others, an autobiography (Bound for Glory) and scads of paintings and drawings … [in a] relatively brief career – Guthrie’s prime period of productivity lasted little more than a decade.”
Nathan Englander Wins World’s Richest Short Story Prize
“Moving from a peep show to a summer camp for the elderly, from a West Bank settlement to a vodka-soaked Florida get-together, Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank has won the American author the €25,000 Frank O’Connor prize.”
Austrian City’s ‘Virtual Public Library’, With QR Codes Instead Of Card Catalogues
“Strangely, the Austrian city of Klagenfurt doesn’t have a public library … However, an initiative dubbed Project Ingeborg is turning the municipality into a book repository of sorts with 70 QR code and NFC chip-equipped stickers. Plastered throughout town, they direct users to web pages where they can download public domain works.”
Does ‘Infinity’ Really Exist?
“This is a surprisingly ancient question. It was Aristotle who first introduced a clear distinction to help make sense of it. He distinguished between two varieties of infinity” – potential infinity and actual inifinities. He argued (maddeningly) that the potential kind does exist while the actual do not and cannot exist. Since then, the mathematicians, physicists, cosmologists and theologians have been weighing in …
Satirical Sketch Show Gives Haitians Comic Relief They Desperately Need
Regards Croisés “is a runaway hit with middle- and working-class Haitians … The show’s improvised skits, which feature all-too-familiar character types – the ill-trained schoolteacher, the mercurial embassy consul – gently send up Haitian daily life, particularly the class divides and crushing hardships that make so many Haitians desperate to get out.”
Fifty Shades Of Grey Spawns A Classical Hit (It’s Tudor Church Music, No Less)
During one of the many sex scenes in the wildly popular e-novel, our heroine uses as background music Thomas Tallis’s ecstatic motet for 40 voices, Spem in alium – and now The Tallis Scholars’ recording of the piece has gone zooming up the iTunes classical charts.
Paavo Järvi Named Chief Conductor Of NHK Symphony
The Estonian-American maestro adds the podium of Japan’s most prestigious orchestra to his music directorships of the Orchestre de Paris, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. (He stepped down last year as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony.)
Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum To Reopen After Three-Year Makeover
“This is no nip-and-tuck job, no simple face-lift. The Rodin and its surrounding gardens have been transported back in time to 1929, thanks to a $9.1 million reincarnation of the original vision of architect Paul Crét and landscape architect Jacques Gréber.”