Robert Hill, the 47-year-old former star of NY City Ballet and ABT, has just taken the reins of the Florida company, and he wants it to develop a recognizable face for the company. “We’ll do the classics, [but] we’re also going to develop a repertory that says ‘This is Orlando Ballet.'”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Richard Attenborough Hospitalized After Fall
The actor and director (Gandhi), now 85, injured his head in a fall earlier this week. He was reportedly in a coma afterwards, but has regained consciousness and is in stable condition.
Deaf Woman Calls Playing Piano ‘An Addiction’
36-year-old chemistry student Jingjing Pan has been deaf since the age of 1. (She can hear very loud sounds with a hearing aid.) Since she came to the Rochester Institute of Technology, several years of music therapy using the Orff method have helped effect a major improvement in her studies as well as giving her an outlet for self-expression.
UK Radio Could Go Digital By 2017
A national commission has suggested that half of all radio listening in Great Britain could be via digital signals by 2015 – a benchmark which could trigger a switchover to digital-only in two to five years.
Olga Lepeshinskaya, ‘Stalin’s Favorite Ballerina,’ 92
A star of the Bolshoi Ballet for 30 years (1933-63), Lepeshinskaya won the Stalin Prize four times and said that the Soviet leader had once called her “dragonfly.”
Uncovering the Reichorchester (The Berlin Phil To You And Me)
Under the Nazi regime, Goebbels renamed the Berlin Philharmonic the Reichsorchester and turned it into the government’s flagship band. For years after the war ended, no one involved would speak about that period, and the orchestra’s archives from the time were destroyed. Now a historian and a filmmaker have produced in-depth looks at that hidden phase in the orchestra’s history.
25 Years Of Diversions (In Pictures)
A photographic history of Diversions, the flagship contemporary dance company of Wales for the past quarter-century.
Looking Inside Susan Sontag (Through Her Diaries)
“Sontag does not expend the energy on being charming, or even comprehensible, that most people paradoxically do in their private journals. Her notes are scattered, aphoristic, sharp… What is remarkable here is the ferocious will, the conscious and almost unnatural assembly of a persona that rises above and beyond that of ordinary people.”
Lost Recordings of Philip Larkin Readings Rediscovered
“The recordings were made in February 1980 by Larkin and his Hull University colleague John Weeks, a sound engineer, but remained on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded for over two decades, until they were discovered in 2006 when Weeks’s son was clearing it out.”
Muscovites Turn Against Solzhenitsyn Street
After Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death in August, President Dmitri Medvedev named a street in Moscow after the Nobel laureate as a tribute. Now residents, along with Soviet nostalgists, are campaigning to get back the thoroughfare’s old name – Big Communist Street.