“Desperate for cash, Orlando Opera may not be able to produce operas after the current season if a new $500,000 fundraising campaign fails. The 51-year-old group… is reeling from a huge deficit that has forced it to deplete the organization’s once-healthy endowment.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
What Recession? Opera Australia Reports Banner Year
“In one of its best box office results in recent years Opera Australia has posted an operating surplus of $848,000 [Aus] for 2008, a year also marked by the death in November of its music director, Richard Hickox.”
It’s Not Only Writers Who Get Blocked
“We tend to think of choreographers as particularly creative people. That may be true, but it does not mean that the ideas and movement flow every minute of the day. Just as writers have writer’s block, dancemakers sometimes get choreographer’s block.” Martha Clarke, Emily Molnar, Pascal Rioult, Keely Garfield and Gesel Mason talk about getting stuck.
Paavo Järvi Pleads Not Guilty To Driving While Intoxicated
“A lawyer for Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conductor Paavo Järvi this morning entered a plea of not guilty to a charge of drunken driving on behalf of his client.” He was arrested after being found asleep at the wheel of a stopped but running car and failing the “walk-the-line” sobriety test.
How Kindle Will (And Won’t) Change The World
Jacob Weisberg: “The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”
Gehry Thinks His Brooklyn Mega-Project Is Dead
“Asked by a trade paper about ‘unrealized commissions’ he most wishes had been built, famed 80-year-old architect Frank Gehry brought up Atlantic Yards. ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen,’ he told the Architect’s Newspaper… Gehry’s Los Angeles-based design firm laid off all two dozen employees working on the Atlantic Yards project in November.”
Why Sylvia Plath’s Suicide Still Holds Our Attention
When her son killed himself last week, the event made headlines worldwide. “Why, of all the stories of creative, brilliant people who have suffered from fatal depressions, does Plath’s tragic legacy resonate so widely? Here, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter D. Kramer, Erica Jong, Andrew Solomon and Elaine Showalter offer their thoughts.”
Using High Technology To Reconstruct Ancient Instrument
“Powerful grid computing has revived a stringed musical instrument that was last played in ancient Greece, Italian researchers announced at a recent conference in Catania, Sicily. Called an epigonion after the 6th century B.C. musician Epigonus of Ambracia, the instrument was somewhat similar to a modern harp.”
Judi Dench Returns To West End Following Injury
The grand Dame was obliged to sit out four performances of Yukio Mishima’s 1965 Madame de Sade over the weekend after spraining her ankle. She returned to the production today but will perform with a cane for the next several days.
Yup, You Can Build Anything With Legos
“Five of Scotland’s top architecture practices have accepted a challenge to design a building out of Lego… [T]he project was designed to show ‘how even the humble plastic brick can be turned into a work of architecture in the right hands’.”