The Russian soprano, one of the Met’s biggest box-office draws, “will not sing Violetta in New York during the 2010-2011 season.” The much anticipated new staging “was to be a version of the Willy Decker production the soprano did at Salzburg in 2005,” presumably imported by the Met for her sake. Netrebko said she has “a concern that she might not be as effective in the staging as she was in the well-known DVD release.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Will The Decline Of Newspapers Be Replayed With Television?
“It’s much harder these days for a major advertiser to find the concentrated mass of eyeballs it needs to reach in order to boost its sales numbers. … [This may well lead to] a vicious cycle in which television audiences fragment, so advertisers stop paying big bucks to run commercials on TV shows, so the funding for the shows dries up, so the quality of the shows declines, so the audience begins to flee even faster.”
Resisting Temptation Is Hard (As The Ancient Greeks Knew)
“Mortals not only overestimate our ability to resist temptation, we also tend to miscalculate the amount of temptation we can handle. Homer was onto it: Odysseus put wax in his shipmate’s ears and had himself tied to the ship’s mast before being exposed to the Sirens’ song. But humans today may need a sociological study to understand that our abilities to control impulses are not what we think they are.”
Nutcracker, Beijing-Opera-Style
A new version of the evergreen ballet by the Dalian Acrobatics Troupe incorporates “many types of Chinese performing arts such as Peking Opera, acrobatics, pantomime martial arts, conjuring and burlesque.” The show is now opening in Shanghai after a European tour.
Come Fly With Twyla: Tharp’s New Sinatra Show Headed For Atlanta, Tour, Maybe Broadway
Come Fly with Me, “previously announced for a world preem at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater this fall, will launch a national tour next summer. Beyond that, producers … see Gotham as one of several possibilities.” The show “strings together Sinatra songs in a nightclub setting, where a group of people, portrayed by a cast of 15 performers, fall in and out of love.”
Houston Symphony CEO Heads Down Under
Matthew VanBesien, the 39-year-old executive director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, is leaving his post at the end of the year for a similar job with the Melbourne Symphony. Among the challenges he’ll face in his new job are the 18-month renovation of the orchestra’s concert hall and hiring a successor to departing chief conductor Oleg Caetani.
Autry National Center In L.A. Abandons Expansion Plans
“In a move that concedes a measure of victory to long-term opponents, the Autry National Center [of the American West] has bowed out of a protracted battle for a $175-million expansion of its facility in Griffith Park.” The city of Los Angeles would not approve the plans unless the Autry committed to support the nearby Southwest Museum of the American Indian, with which the Autry merged in 2003, “as a fully functioning art institution in perpetuity” at its current location.
Fidel Issues His Own ‘Little Red Book’
“The Diccionario de pensamientos de Fidel Castro, or Dictionary of Fidel Castro’s Thoughts, runs to 339 pages and contains 1,978 of the former Cuban president’s sayings” – arranged alphabetically – “taken from the speeches, statements and writings he gave during the 49 years he ran the country.”
‘Non-Morally-Anguished Jews Dealing Out Spaghetti-Western Justice’ To Nazis
Jeffrey Goldberg talks to Quentin Tarantino talks about how the latter’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, is a giant “Jewish revenge fantasy” in which the director “allow[s] his Jewish characters … to beat Nazis, scalp Nazis, burn Nazis, and carve swastikas into the foreheads of Nazis.”
New York’s Knitting Factory To Reopen In Hipster Central
“The Knitting Factory, which ceased regular programming in TriBeCa at the end of last year after two decades in Manhattan, will reopen in a smaller space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Sept. 9.” The club “opened in 1987 on East Houston Street on the Lower East Side, earning a wide reputation for its mix of rock, jazz and avant-garde music, and in 1994 it moved to … TriBeCa.”