“Melia Tourangeau, president and CEO, and music director Keith Lockhart volunteered to take a 10 percent salary cut, while the musicians of the Utah Symphony on March 26 voted to give back 11.5 percent of their salaries and benefits for this fiscal year.” Eight administrative staff positions have been eliminated; all remaining employees have accepted pay cuts.
Author: Matthew Westphal
BBC Needs A Dance Champion
“Dance UK director Caroline Miller has criticised the BBC for its lack of dance programming and expertise, claiming that a shortage of shows featuring the work of British companies is having a negative impact on the industry. The head of the lobbying body has called on the Corporation to reinstate a dance expert to its arts commissioning team.”
Margreta Elkins, 78, Glamorous Australian Mezzo
“At 1.78m tall, with creamy blonde hair, beautiful legs, a love of fashion and a sense of style, she was probably also the most glamorous [of Australia’s opera singers]. In the 1960s she was likened to Doris Day.”
PEN Joins In On O. Henry Prize
“In an era of economic uncertainty and consolidation, even the short story could use a little additional support: the Anchor Books imprint of Random House said that it had partnered with the literary and human rights organization the PEN American Center and would rename its annual ‘O. Henry Prize Stories’ collection the ‘PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.'”
Plan For New Rambert Dance Co. HQ Back On Track
“Rambert Dance Company can proceed with plans for a new £14 million home near London’s South Bank ‘subject to contractual issues being resolved’, despite a legal wrangle preventing the larger building scheme it is part of from going ahead.”
Rolando Villazón Pulls Out Of Remainder Of Met Run
The popular Mexican tenor, whose vocal troubles in the past few years have led to considerable speculation and worry (and a bit of sniping), has canceled all his appearances in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore at the Metropolitan Opera. (He withdrew from his first two dates in the opera last month.) The reason given is “acute laryngitis.”
He Was Just Too Young For That
Matthew Zachary was a promising 21-year-old concert pianist and composer when a brain tumor cost him the use of his left hand. As he battled his cancer over the next 13 years, he created the I’m Too Young for This! Cancer Foundation, so named because his doctors had misdiagnosed him at first for just that reason. This weekend, long symptom-free and with control over his left hand restored, he gives a concert for the first time in more than a decade.
First Novels Belong In The Basement (And Other Rules For Writers)
“It gives the home ballast. It lends the basement the appropriate air of mystery, history, and parental dreams deferred that all basements should have. The longer the book, the better. Epic works of over 400 pages, like mine, really serve to anchor a house. That’s why the proliferation of self-publishing makes me uneasy.”
If Cage And Boulez Had Played Harpsichord
“In her performances [Jane] Chapman uses electronic effects and techniques that make the harpsichord sound like a synthesizer by connecting the keyboard to a computer. She also places objects inside the instrument and plucks the strings or uses an EBow, a handheld device normally used by rock guitarists that makes the strings vibrate continuously.”
Listening To The Music Of The Sphere
“[It’s] probably the most ambitious seismological project ever conducted. Its name is USArray and its aim is to run what amounts to an ultrasound scan over the 48 contiguous states of the US. Through the seismic shudders and murmurs that rack Earth’s innards, it will build up an unprecedented 3D picture of what lies beneath North America.”