“Instead of focusing on another country, the major festival at the Kennedy Center next year will focus on another landscape: the terrain inhabited by artists with various disabilities, from deafness to diabetes, around the world.” Other 2009-10 season highlights include visits from the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi, Cate Blanchett as Blanche in Streetcar, Jennifer Higdon’s new piano concerto, and festivals of “Ballet Across America” and “Gospel Across America.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Ten Habits Of Highly Effective Public Radio Pledge Drives
June Thomas: “Pledge drive is last-nerve-frayingly exasperating – but it’s also sheer genius. One recent weekend, I fast-forwarded through the actual programming and listened only to the sales patter… What I found was a band of ace pitchmen who know their audience better than we know ourselves.”
Piano Maker Deals With Recession By Switching To Kitchen Tables
“The global economic crisis has forced world-renowned Czech piano maker Petrof to hit the soft pedal and switch production from grands to lacquered kitchen furniture.”
You’ll Love This Schoenberg – Or Your Money Back!
“Tonight the Philharmonia Orchestra is performing Schoenberg’s vast, gorgeously late-romantic Gurrelieder, complete with six soloists, chorus and speaker, at Birmingham Symphony Hall. On the website it announces ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back.’ We are so confident that you will enjoy this wonderful concert, that we will give you your money back if you don’t!'”
Juliette Binoche Says She’ll Never Do Another Dance Project
The Oscar-winning actress (The English Patient) “says touring for her dance collaboration with Britain choreographer Akram Khan was so exhausting she’s unlikely to take part in a similar project again. […] ‘I’m really enjoying it,’ Binoche said, but adding, ‘I’m suffering.'”
But She’s Grateful For the Bad Reviews This One Got
“Oscar-winning French actor Juliette Binoche said Tuesday she welcomed the critical mauling her new dance performance received when it opened in London, as it sparked improvements in the show […] and the effort had resulted in glowing reviews in Paris, Montreal and Sydney when it toured.” The piece, titled In-I, runs this month in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul.
Gangsta Art: Paintings By The Kray Twins Sell For £17K
“Nine artworks painted by the Kray twins in prison have been sold for a total of £17,125 – triple their estimate. Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ran a gang in London’s East End in the 1950s and 1960s, were both jailed for life for murder in 1969. The works were painted during the 1970s when the pair were in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle Of Wight.”
Sign Up For Your Chance To Be Monumental Statuary!
“The time has come for anyone who considers themself a real work of art to apply for much more than 15 minutes of fame: one whole hour of monumental grandeur, alone on top of the empty granite plinth in the corner of Trafalgar Square.”
Osmo And His Minnesotans Conquer London
Ivan Hewitt sums up the critical consensus on Tuesday night’s sold-out Minnesota Orchestra concert at the Barbican: “And what a marvellous sound the orchestra makes! […] Vänskä and the Minnesotans built a cumulative tension through every twist and turn, right up to the final explosion of joy at the end.”
Doctor Atomic, Not Quite So Much
John Adams’s opera is having its UK premiere at ENO, and the London critics, like many of their American colleagues, find fault with Peter Sellars’s libretto. Rupert Christiansen puts it most starkly: “[It] makes for a peculiarly inert plot, with all the corny ‘countdown’ tension of a rotten episode of Star Trek… and dramatis personae who remain flat figures, lumbered with unshaped words that they seem to recite rather than embody.” Not all critics agree on how much this problem matters, though, and they mostly like Adams’s score.