The Los Angeles Philharmonic is sending off its departing music director with a special microsite (www.celebratesalonen.com) featuring 15 hours of music, 4 hours of audio interviews and 3 hours of video clips (all free and on-demand), as well as an interactive timeline of Esa-Pekka’s 17 years with the Phil.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Stratford’s Caesar and Cleopatra To Hit Movie Screens, Cable TV
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s staging of Shaw’s drama, starring Christopher Plummer, will be shown in one-night gala screenings at 80 Cineplex theaters across Canada. In a separate deal, the production will subsequently be aired north of the border on CTV-Bravo!.
Joan Miró, Assassinating Painting
“‘I imagine to attack every day more and more thoroughly,’ he wrote to a friend in 1928, using the violent language he had learned from Surrealist associates like André Breton,… “[to] make my victims die cleanly, without agonizing nerve spasm.”
Pop Arranger Ray Ellis, 85
“Ray Ellis, the versatile pop music arranger who wrote the charts for hits by the Four Lads, Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Doris Day and Johnny Mathis, has died. He was 85.”
Shostakovich’s First Film Score, Restored
The premiere of the 1929 silent New Babylon, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich performed live, didn’t exactly go according to plan: Soviet censors cut entire scenes from the movie, and nobody told the composer. The resulting fiasco led to the music being shelved for decades. Now a Russian film festival in Australia has resurrected the original version of New Babylon – with Shostakovich’s score.
Eyewitness Account Of Charge Of The Light Brigade For Auction
“A first-hand account of the Charge of the Light Brigade, by a trooper who lost an eye and part of his skull in the famous engagement, is to be sold, 120 years after the soldier wrote it to escape from begging on the streets.”
Leftist Professors Indoctrinating Students? It’s A Myth
“An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students… But a handful of new studies have found such worries to be overwrought. Three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.”
By Popular Demand, Jeff Koons’s Versailles Show Extended
“Mixing Jeff Koons’s outrageous artwork with the extravagence of France’s Château de Versailles appears to be a success, as organizers have extended the U.S. pop artist’s show through the new year.”
Sci-Fi Giant Michael Crichton Dies At 66
The immensely successful author/screenwriter/director – responsible for The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Westworld and the television series ER, among dozens of other properties – died Tuesday “after a courageous and private battle against cancer.”
‘The Obama Of Italy’
“He’s a highly intellectual, extremely confident, smoothly articulate politician who grew up without a father, then wrote a best-selling book about it.” That would be Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome who lost his race for prime minister in this year’s Italian elections. The former editor of the newspaper L’Unità, he has written a dozen books of nonfiction; his first novel has just been published in English as The Discovery of Dawn.