Hélène Berr, a Jewish student at the Sorbonne who stayed behind in occupied Paris to help rescue Jewish children, was captured and sent to Auschwitz in 1944. The wartime journal she wrote for her fiancé survived; it was published this year and is becoming a bestseller.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Outhouse-Turned-Museum Draws Crowds In Munich
An 1894 outhouse in Munich that served as a public restroom until 1992 has been repurposed as a space for exhibiting art (largely graffiti art). About 800 people visited on opening night alone.
Let’s Hear More Unfinished Music!
Tom Service: “There’s no better way to get inside a composer’s head than to hear their works in progress. What about putting the first and last versions of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony next to one another? […] What about performing Beethoven’s original ideas for the end of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony (something Leonard Bernstein did in a famous recording)?”
Afghanistan Tries To Stop The Cultural Carnage
“Afghanistan is stepping up an ambitious campaign to stop the looting of the country’s archaeological sites, with a programme to build museums, train archaeologists and repatriate the billions of dollars worth of stolen antiquities that have been spirited through its porous borders during the past seven years.”
Yma Sumac, ‘Nightingale of the Andes’, 86
“Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born singer whose spectacular multi-octave vocal range and exotic persona made her an international sensation in the 1950s, has died. She was 86.”
‘Why I Walked Out Of Doctor Atomic‘
Literary critic Ron Rosenbaum now thinks of John Adams’s 2005 work as “the Emperor’s New Opera.” He found that “the music and the sets couldn’t have been more effectively dramatic. But the libretto, the words [assembled by Peter Sellars] … They were pedestrian, speechifying, and painfully simplistic (when not embarrassingly schlocky as in the “love scenes”). […] I began to wonder whether opera follows different rules: Because words are sung, do they transcend any bombastic triviality, any wounding awfulness?”
L.A. To Present 10-Week Arts Fest Around Ring
“In what could be the region’s most ambitious, broadest-based artistic endeavor since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival,” more than 50 SoCal institutions (including the Getty Museum, LACMA, the L.A. Phil and Mark Taper Forum) are joining to stage a 10-week festival around L.A. Opera’s 2010 production of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle.
‘The Steinway Of Concert Cars’
Percussionist/composer/actor Christian von Richthofen tours Germany with a show called Auto! Auto!, in which he and a partner use a car as a giant percussion instrument, reducing the vehicle to rubble over 90 rhythmic minutes. (His favorite model – the “Steinway” – is the Opel Kadet E.)
And You Thought ‘Celebrity Architecture’ Meant Gehry And Calatrava
In Dubai, “not content with building hotels in the shape of God, or Mammon, or Cher, the powers that be have decided that what the place really needs is buildings actually designed by celebrities, and to this end they have commissioned all manner of stars to do just that.” Said stars include Brad Pitt, Karl Lagerfeld, Boris Becker and Giorgio Armani.
Even Comic Books Are Weighing In On Presidential Campaign
While DC Comics won’t allow Superman and Batman to endorse, Image Comics’ Savage Dragon endorses Obama on a cover, two publishers have produced graphic novel-style candidate bios, and Bluewater Comics’ “Female Force” series has featured Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.