The Syracuse Philharmonic Society “has new leaders, a new financial plan rooted in Syracuse University’s Setnor School of Music and a flexible attitude about the venues and kinds of music it will play. A new group could immediately start performing, but it would take about five years to evolve into a stable, full-time orchestra.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Alec Baldwin Wants To Be Mayor Of New York
The actor – a longtime film, stage and television star as well as the radio and TV voice of the New York Philharmonic – “said that he would probably sit out in 2013 but run in a later election, and that he wanted to educate himself about the mayor’s office first.”
London Theatres Cancel Shows Due To Riots
“Tonight’s shows at London’s Landor, Arcola, Union and King’s Head Theatres have been cancelled, and Battersea Arts Centre is also closing early in response to the riots across London.”
Can We No Longer Relate To Conventional Sculpture?
Michael Kimmelman: “Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture, whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new … I mean traditional European sculpture … the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums.”
Pasadena’s Guerrilla Art Masterpiece Could Return
No one’s quite ready to stick The Fork in the Road and say it’s done, but the end of the year-long saga of Pasadena’s favorite piece of guerrilla art could be in sight. Just a few more shreds of red tape remain … and the giant 18-foot wooden utensil will go back to the fork in the road at St. John and Pasadena Avenues.”
Scotland To Spend £1.5M On Getting Scots To Dance
“The Get Scotland Dancing initiative has been set up by the Scottish Government to encourage more people to take up healthier activities.”
Opera Australia Head Gives 2012 Season A Thorough Revamp
The first season programmed by artistic director Lyndon Terracini includes a three-opera summer Mozart festival (in English), Bruce Beresford directing Korngold’s Die tote Stadt with the orchestra piped in in surround-sound from the studio next door, a Francesca Zambello Traviata on a floating stage in Sydney Harbour, and a national tour of South Pacific starring antipodean heartthrob Teddy Tahu Rhodes.
Heathrow Airport Hires New Writer-In-Residence
“This month the best-selling ‘lad-lit’ novelist Tony Parsons becomes the second author to take up the airport operator BAA’s invitation to spend a week at Heathrow. In fact, he’s there right now, observing stressed holidaymakers and bored business travellers, eagle-eyed security guards and overworked cleaners, as he works on a new book.”
R. Crumb Dumps Sydney Festival After Being Called Pervert
“World-renowned American cartoonist Robert Crumb has pulled out of his headline appearance at the Graphic arts festival in Sydney later this month. He made the decision after being described in a Sydney newspaper as a ‘self-confessed sex pervert’ and a ‘very warped human being’.”
To Escape London Rioters, Bystanders Barricade Themselves Inside Historic Theatre
“A small group of people said they had barricaded themselves inside the 110-year-old Hackney Empire theatre to escape the violence. ‘We are stuck inside,’ said one person … ‘It’s very scary. We are in the back of the building, staying away from the front. We have barricaded the doors and put chains on the doors.”