“Hamburg ended a row Thursday with the firm building a concert hall” – the Elbphilharmonie, designed by starchitects Herzog and de Meuron and intended to be a tourist attraction in its own right (à la Sydney Opera House) as well as a cultural mecca – “[that is] already years behind schedule and millions over budget.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Atom Egoyan On Directing His First Chinese Opera
“I think I was really aware of being able to use a different dramaturgy than I would with a Western opera. … It’s not naturalist by any means. It’s very expository and that was one of the huge challenges. … You’re also dealing with two different traditions, one [singer] is coming from Beijing opera, one is coming from Sichuan opera, and they have their own very different gestures and different ways of approaching character work.”
Harry Belafonte, Freedom Fighter
The singer and activist “discusses his friendship with Martin Luther King, his relationship with President John F Kennedy, and the humiliation that led him to become more heavily involved in the fight against racial segregation.”
Robert Frost Is Actually A Terrifying Poet
“[The] key to understanding Frost is to do exactly what the poet does: to take both sides by taking neither. … You will never find his apple-pie versifier divorced from his terrifying reaper, any more than you will find his colloquial voice unbound from formal meter. … Frost is an exacting, serious, honest poet, but he is neutral to the point of scariness.”
The 20-Year Virgin Loses It: Playwright Nicky Silver On His First Broadway Production
“Much was made of the fact that this was my first play on Broadway, after having had plays produced Off Broadway for almost 20 years. … I’ve been asked, now that we’ve closed, if I might reflect on some of these. I shall endeavor to do so. It won’t be easy, as I’d like to retain some sense of dignity, and were I to be completely honest, it would be apparent that I have none.”
London’s Shard Opens With Empty Floors And Sagging Rents
“Superstar architect Renzo Piano calls the European Union’s new tallest building a ‘vertical city’, but … [the] elongated glass pyramid, built atop a train station in a scruffy neighbourhood near the Thames, will open with 26 floors of vacant office space, and developers have to fill it at a time when rents are at the flattest in at least 50 years.”
China’s Top Painter Hits A Wall
“Zhang Xiaogang, age 54, a Beijing-based painter whose hypnotic portraits have topped $10 million at auction, recently suffered a pair of heart attacks, and his doctors told him – for the first time in his three-decade career – to rest. Few artists embody China’s art boom better than Mr. Zhang, who grew up amid the Cultural Revolution … Yet his desire to keep breakneck pace with China’s developing art scene has taken a toll.”
A Dance Critic’s Passion For The Statue Of Liberty
Alastair Macaulay: “I don’t like to sit close to dancing in theaters: I have to feel the whole stage space around and above the dancers. It matters to me how even tiny effects of dancing can register in the depths and heights of a vast space. The marvel of Liberty is that her stance and her gesture radiate for miles. The emotion she generates keeps changing, according to angle, distance, time of day, weather and light.”
Our Ozzes, Our Selves: Why We Keep Repaving The Yellow Brick Road
“New books, movies, and plays keep spilling out of the perennial wellspring of Oz. Each reveals a facet of that fabled land – and of the generation that produces the work.”
It’s A Nordic World; The Rest Of Us Just Live In It
“In detective fiction and cooking, in art, architecture and design, the new Nordic way has won over fans and followers everywhere, as figures such as the late Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, Danish chef René Redzepi and Oslo architecture firm Snøhetta have risen to top of their fields. … What unites the vast expanse of Europe’s northern edge in such a wide range of disciplines?”