An oboist by training, Malgoire in 1966 founded La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy, France’s first period-instrument orchestra, with which he made more than 140 recordings.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.16.18
Let’s move before they change the parking rate
No, I cannot quit writing about economic-impact-of-the-arts reports. Let’s try something a little more focused, and talk about … parking. Parking is part of the cost of attending a show, if it takes place in … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2018-04-15
Fixing the Actual “Glass Ceiling” at the Metropolitan Museum: My Q&A with Keith Christiansen
With all the recent pushback against the supposed “glass ceiling” at the Metropolitan Museum (occasioned by the naming of an eminently qualified male, Max Hollein, to assume its directorship), let’s take a look at another glass-ceiling problem there, which is unambiguous and needs immediate remediation: … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-04-16
West Side Story and Leonard Bernstein at 100
CultureCrash’s guest columnist, Lawrence Christon, remembers the Broadway roots of the film West Side Story, and has this to say about the forces that made it all possible. … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2018-04-16
Music by the Second
Sometimes I’m amazed when I realize the number of clocks I encounter every day: on the wall, on the stove, on the phone, on the screen I’m typing on now. … Unlike the clocks I grew up with – clocks with faces and arms and reference points around a circle – the clocks that surround me now designate only the moment I am in, without context, without motion. … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2018-04-16
Monday Book Recommendation: Lilian Terry’s Jazz Friends
Lilian Terry, Dizzy Duke Brother Ray And Friends (Illinois)
Lilian Terry’s book is full of anecdotes about her friendships with the musicians mentioned in the title – and dozens of others. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-04-16
Jerry Saltz Of New York Magazine Wins Pulitzer Prize For Criticism
“Known for an accessible and punchy writing style that decodes the complexities of contemporary art for a wide audience, Saltz is, perhaps, the most famous art critic in America. … [His] winning essay, ‘My Life As A Failed Artist,’ published last April, chronicles his pain and regret over an art career that never quite got off the ground – and what his experience as an art-school dropout taught him about being a critic.”
Pulitzer Prize For Drama Goes To Martyna Majok’s ‘Cost Of Living’
“The Pulitzer board called Cost of Living ‘an honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals: a former trucker and his recently paralyzed ex-wife, and an arrogant young man with cerebral palsy and his new caregiver.'”
Andrew Sean Greer’s ‘Less’ Wins Pulitzer Prize For Fiction
“The novel centers on a struggling San Francisco author – Arthur Less – who, nearing age 50, decides to tour the world to escape himself. ‘The tragicomic business of being alive,’ he says, ‘is getting to him.’ … Greer is the author of five other books of fiction, including The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli.”
Hollywood Has A Gun Problem It Needs To Fix
“It’s ironic, then, that Wayne LaPierre and the NRA’s other spokespeople blame Hollywood’s glorification of violence whenever there is a mass shooting. What they ignore is that nearly every American film involving weaponry might as well be an NRA infomercial. On the big screen, guns rarely kill innocent bystanders, they don’t go off by accident, and they aren’t used to slaughter children in classrooms. Pick any action movie at random, and I’d wager it could be advertised using LaPierre’s catchphrase: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.'”
The Forgotten Black Pioneers Of Early Moviemaking
“Thirteen black film companies were operating by the end of World War I, although most of them released only one film. … Black producers and directors founded their own film companies out of a desire to counter racist images and enable blacks to see themselves on the screen as they really were.”
If We Want Robots To Have Real Cognition, They’ll Have To Feel As Well As Think
“In the quest to create intelligent robots, designers tend to focus on purely rational, cognitive capacities. It’s tempting to disregard emotion entirely, or include only as much as necessary. But without emotion to help determine the personal significance of objects and actions, I doubt that true intelligence can exist – not the kind that beats human opponents at chess or the game of Go, but the sort of smarts that we humans recognise as such. Although we can refer to certain behaviours as either ’emotional’ or ‘cognitive’, this is really a linguistic short-cut. The two can’t be teased apart.”
In Defense Of The Concert Hall, Still Relevant In The 21st Century
“Yes, the physical manifestations of music worship, structures so Romantic that they wouldn’t be foreign to Richard Wagner. Though some argue that the etiquette for concert halls is outdated, elitist, and partly responsible for classical music’s struggle to find new audiences, concert halls actually provide unique experiences that have become all too rare.”
Story Of Four Knuckleheads Who Stole Rare Books From College Library Is Now A Hollywood Action-Comedy
“I wouldn’t know personally, but smoking weed sometimes gives people great bad ideas. In the case of four college freshmen in Kentucky, the idea was to steal upwards of $11 million dollars in rare folios of John James Audubon’s classic bird illustrations and writing.” And they didn’t even manage that, as Peter Clark recounts: the folios were too heavy to escape with, and they got caught with other books they did steal – thanks to the badass librarians they made the mistake of tangling with. This epic tale of epic fail is on the way to the big screen, under the title American Animals.