Jerusalem’s Temple Mount may be the most notorious of the spots “where ancient history meets modern politics,” but it’s certainly not the only one.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Right-Wing Protest Art Attacks Brooklyn Museum Exhibit
“Scott LoBaido, a Staten Island painter, describes himself as a ‘Creative Patriot.’ … He’s also a religious Catholic and was so offended by the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, a video that features a shot of ants crawling over a crucifix, that he decided to take matters into his own hands.”
Esa-Pekka Salonen Wins $100K Grawemeyer Award
The composer-conductor’s Violin Concerto, commissioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Leila Josefowicz, “was completed and premiered in 2009 during Salonen’s emotional final weeks as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It has since been played around the world.”
Shostakovich’s Long-Lost Ape-Man Opera
“The bizarre story of a grotesque, morally degenerate half-human, half-ape, Orango was commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater in 1932.” The work was likely never finished, but the 40-minute prologue was discovered in a Moscow museum in 2003 and will have its premiere next weekend in Los Angeles.
Sena Jurinac, 90, Soprano And Mezzo
“[She] made her debut at the Vienna opera as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro on May 1, 1945 – the first production after World War II. She performed as Cherubino 129 times and went on to become one of the best-known singers at the opera house in the 1940s and 50s, singing in operas including Don Giovanni, Der Rosenkavalier and La Bohème.”
Soprano Montserrat Figueras, Leading Light Of Early Music, Dead At 69
“[She] and her husband of more than 40 years, the viola da gamba master and conductor Jordi Savall, introduced generations of listeners to music that spanned many centuries and lands from the Middle East to Latin America. In pursuit of their shared artistic vision, the duo founded three ensembles: Hespèrion XX (now called Hespèrion XXI), La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations.”
Royal Winnipeg Ballet Cancels Ontario Tour Due To ‘Fiscal Pressures’
“The Manitoba troupe was slated to bring its newest original ballet, the psychological drama Svengali, to Toronto for two dates in January before continuing onto Hamilton, Ont. and London, Ont.”
Paul Motian, 80, Jazz Drummer And Composer
“[One] of the most influential jazz musicians of the past 50 years,” he was a key member of the legendary combos of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. “But it was in the second half of his life that Mr. Motian found himself as a composer and bandleader, with work that could be counterintuitive or straightforward, runic or crowd-pleasing.”
For Mariinsky’s Second Stage, Cool Canadian Modernism
The St. Petersburg theater’s new adjunct building, designed by Toronto’s Diamond and Schmitt Architects and expected to open next year, “will be a contemporary performance space with soaring glass walls and a roof-top ampitheatre designed to attract younger and wider audiences to the performing arts in Russia’s former imperial city.”
Intellectual History, Long Out Of Fashion, Begins A Comeback
The field was “swept aside in the 1960s by the rise of social and then cultural history, which regarded talk of ‘the American mind’ as code for ‘the mind of white, male Americans who happened to write books.’ Today, however, a new breed of young intellectual historian is aiming to integrate the spirit of ‘history from below’ with an approach that doesn’t chop American history off at the neck.”