“Severely damaged during the Second World War and closed to the public for more than 70 years, the Romanesque Hall at the heart of Budapest’s Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts) will be a highlight of its reopening tomorrow (31 October), following a three-year restoration. The total cost of the renovation was around €40m.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Idea That It’s Too Risky To Program Plays By Black Playwrights Is A Myth: UK Study
“Providing evidence to counteract the idea that such work presents a risk in terms of audiences, ticket revenue or artistic quality, [the report] concludes that ‘it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the reasoning behind risk-averse programming, when risk is all too often closely associated with race’.”
They’ve Been Building Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia For 136 Years Without A Permit. Barcelona Has Fined Them €36 Million
This isn’t as unfair as it might sound: the money is mostly going to improving city infrastructure and maintenance in the area around the church, which gets more than 3 million visitors each year.
New Program Offers Low-Interest Loans To Arts Groups For ‘Social Impact’
The UK nonprofit Nesta “has launched a new £3.7m fund that will make small repayable loans to English arts, cultural and creative organisations … to help [them] ‘articulate, monitor and evaluate their social impact’. Recipients of longer term loans that can demonstrate they are achieving their goals will be rewarded with lower interest rates.”
Monday Recommendation: Bing Crosby, Continued
Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby – Swinging On A Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (Little, Brown)
Seventeen years following his initial installment, Gary Giddins continues the story of the man who absorbed and internalized early jazz values in the 1920s and became the most important popular singer in the world.
The Diaries Of Genocide Victims (And Not Only Anne Frank’s) Are Both Compelling And Important
“Nothing collapses the distance between the reader and the historical past quite like a diary. Written in the moment, as events unfold, it captures the details of daily life that inevitably get lost in later accounts by historians and even survivors. What did people eat and how much? … What was the mood of the ghetto from one day to the next? What were the daily hardships and the occasional reprieves? These insights are rarely found in any other source. In addition, some writers had literary ambitions beyond just documenting their days …, grappling with the biggest questions of what it means to be human in a cruel world.”
France’s Latest Social Justice Battle Is Over Accents
It’s called glottophobie: “Derived from the Greek words for tongue and fear, it refers to discrimination against those who speak the language of Molière and Proust with non-standard pronunciation. Regional accents are hardly unique to France. But a history of imposing homogeneity means that, even today, those whose French does not sound Parisian face derision.”
Annapurna Devi, The Greatest Sitar Player That Almost No One Heard, Dead At 91
She was the daughter of Allaudin Khan, the greatest Indian classical musician of his age; her brother was Ali Akbar Khan and her first husband was Ravi Shankar. Her specialty was the surbahar (bass sitar), and when she and her husband performed together, audiences were even more impressed by her than by him. About a decade into that (very stormy) marriage, she stopped performing in public entirely and became (though something of a recluse) one of India’s most revered classical music teachers.
James Karen, Prolific Character Actor, Dead At 94
After a thriving stage career, he went to Hollywood and appeared in 204 films, from Poltergeist to The China Syndrome to Return of the Living Dead to Mulholland Drive. Among his many TV appearances, he played the villain in the final episode of Little House on the Prairie and was for years the pitchman for Pathmark supermarkets.
Remembering New York City Ballet’s Original Home, City Center
“Jacques d’Amboise, Patricia Wilde, Allegra Kent and Edward Villella talk about the roles they danced at the theater, which is celebrating George Balanchine and its 75th anniversary as a palace of the arts.”