“News that heavy metal is to receive serious scholarly attention in Salzburg has raised some eyebrows elsewhere in these pages. So is it heretical that the city of Mozart should be putting Metallica and Slayer centre stage? Not a bit of it. Heavy metal is probably the only other musical discipline that fetishises technical virtuosity as much as classical music: Edward Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen are the Horowitz and Kissin of their genre.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Britain’s Top Rock Festival Fails To Turn Profit
“For the first time since its inception almost four decades ago, the Glastonbury festival did not make any money this year. […] ‘Glastonbury costs £22m now, it’s a huge cost,’ [organizer Michael] Eavis recently told BBC 6 Music. ‘The infrastructure, the fencing, the roads, the water and the loos, the marquees, the management, the security and the police, it goes on and on so we do have to sell out in order to make it work.'”
The Beauty Of Divine Inspiration (And Vice Versa)
Jonathan Jones: “To me, the whole point of atheism is not worrying too much about it. Campaigning against God, making an issue of unbelief, is merely producing a mirror image of religion itself. […] [But] Religion, in other words, is mixed up with magic, or to put it another way, the kinds of religion that nurture art tend to be. Catholic idolatry begets beauty. Protestantism does not.”
And Then There’s Ugliness
“Sociologists, writers, lawyers and economists have begun to examine ugliness, suggesting that the subject has been marginalized in history and that discrimination against the unattractive, while difficult to document or prevent, is a quiet but widespread injustice.”
First Bolshoi-Style Academy Outside Russia Opens Next Year
“The Australasian Bolshoi Ballet Academy will open in Melbourne next year, to the benefit of dancers and audiences. The academy will be the only one in the world outside of Moscow training dancers in the highly-acclaimed Russian Bolshoi system.”
NY City Ballet Cuts Saratoga Season
“The New York City Ballet will be spending only two weeks at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center next July, instead of the usual three.” The decision was made in response to the current economic turmoil: the company typically loses $1 million on its Saratoga residency.
California’s Opera Pacific Cancels Season, May Disband
“Three days after its final performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Santa Ana-based Opera Pacific, [Orange] county’s only major opera company, announced Tuesday that it will cancel the remainder of its 2008-2009 season and will likely close down operations for good.” The lost productions include Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath and Strauss’s Salome starring Deborah Voigt.
Canadian Opera Company Posts Surplus
“The Canadian Opera Company had a surplus of C$41,000 for the 2007-08 season, COC president David Ferguson announced Tuesday. It was the company’s sixth consecutive surplus. […] Box office revenues hit a record high and annual private sector support for the company has increased, he said.”
Malevich Canvas Sells For $60 Million
At Sotheby’s in New York, “the star was the abstract Suprematist Composition painted in 1916 by the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. It set a world record for Russian art at $60 million.”
Meanwhile, Munch and Degas Go For Nearly $40 Million Each
At that same Sotheby’s auction, considered disappointing overall, Edvard Munch’s Vampire sold for $38 million and Edgar Degas’s Dancer in Repose went for $37 million.