Author: Matthew Westphal

New Film Shows Us An Actual Soviet Show Trial

In The Trial, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa and his team use only rare, recently-discovered film (with sound) of a full 1930 show trial in Moscow. Masha Gessen explains just how fitting the term show trial is: “the judges, the prosecutor, the court clerks, and the defendants are all members of the cast. They are performing their assigned roles. The rest of the people in the hall — men and women of different ages, some dressed in military uniforms and some in civilian suits, but all wearing their best — are the audience, and their job is to believe everything they see.” — The New Yorker

Carlos Miguel Prieto Cleared Of Overpaying Foreign Soloists At Mexico’s National Symphony

“The cultural secretary’s office admitted that the [earlier report] relied on information in a public government database that, in effect, converted the guest performers’ fees [between] American dollars to Mexican pesos twice, vastly inflating the totals in some cases.” Some observers are suggesting that the charge against Prieto, music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic as well as of Mexico’s flagship orchestra, was being pushed by musicians unhappy with his leadership. — The New Orleans Advocate

Lin-Manuel Miranda Sees Audience Member Shooting Video, Calls Her Out From Stage Literally Without Missing A Beat

The creator of Hamilton, playing the title role in the musical’s high-profile run in Puerto Rico, was in the middle of the song “My Shot” when he spotted someone recording the show on her phone — and ad-libbed, in rhythm, “Lady filming in the 4th row, please stop it.” (After the show he tweeted “Please don’t make me do that shit again.”) — CBS

Poet Mary Oliver Dead At 83

“Often compared to her literary idol Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom she shared an abiding interest in the natural world, Ms. Oliver combined a precise, unfussy style with an almost religious devotion to examining nature. … Ms. Oliver was a rarity in modern American literature — a best-selling poet, so popular she was interviewed by journalist Maria Shriver in O, the Oprah Magazine.” — The Washington Post

Why’s Everyone In Cremona So Nervous About Noise Right Now? It’s About The Strads

Eventually, the centuries-old string instruments for which this Italian city is famous will become too fragile to play. “So that future generations won’t miss out on hearing [them], three sound engineers are producing the ‘Stradivarius Sound Bank’ — a database storing all the possible tones that four instruments selected from the Museo del Violino’s collection can produce.” But the mics are extremely sensitive … — The New York Times