“Lift: Slobodan Show premiered at a packed theatre in Gračanica, a Serb-populated town outside Kosovo’s capital of Pristina. It was performed by a local theatre group and artists from Serbia. Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority shunned the play.” Slobodan Milošević, the eponymous dictator, died in 2006 while on trial for war crimes and genocide in The Hague.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Johannesburg’s Opera Company Shuts Down
With a statement that “due to the prevailing socioeconomic environment, it has proven very difficult … to raise enough funds to cover all operational needs,” Gauteng Opera announced that, after 19 years in operation, it will close at the end of this month.
A Photo Journal From The Ballet School In The Slums Of Nairobi
“Over the past 18 months Swedish photographer Fredrik Lerneryd, who is based in Nairobi, has joined [teacher Mike] Wamaya and the girls for about two dozen of their Wednesday ballet lessons.”
He’s Been Dead 100 Years, And He’s Still The First Modern Composer: Stephen Hough Writes About Claude Debussy
“Although it was Debussy’s orchestral work Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune that Pierre Boulez described as ‘the beginning of modern music,'” writes the MacArthur-winning pianist, “it was always at the piano where his revolutionary new approach to form and timbre developed.” (includes sound clips played by Hough and a playlist of his favorite Debussy recordings)
Three Ballets About ‘The Nature Of Woman’, All Created By Men – This ‘Epitomises Everything In Ballet That Needs To Change’
Luke Jennings: “The problem with Femmes – a new triple-bill from Les Grands Ballets Canadiens – “apart from the sheer, kitsch ghastliness of the concept, is that it epitomises the lack of agency of women in classical dance. The reverence for the feminine implied by Balanchine’s quote [‘Ballet is woman’] has always been contingent on women knowing their place. Ballet relies on women to make up most of its performing workforce, but overwhelmingly reserves positions of artistic power for men.”
35 Years On, Can Leonard Bernstein’s ‘A Quiet Place’ Be Redeemed?
When the piece premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1983, most of the reviews were harsh: The New York Times pronounced it “a pretentious failure.” Now, with the Bernstein centennial upon us, David Patrick Stearns looks at two versions of A Quiet Place – one brand new and released by Bernstein’s estate – that aim to show audiences the work’s underestimated strengths.
Boston’s Pair Of Rembrandt Portraits Gets Badly-Needed Restoration
“The two paintings, ‘Portrait of a Woman Wearing a Gold Chain’ and ‘Portrait of a Man Wearing a Black Hat,’ are a keystone in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ expanding collection of works by the Dutch masters. And now, for the first time in at least 50 years, both works are undergoing a painstaking restoration that could reveal new secrets in these familiar faces.” Says curator Ronni Baer, “They’ll just look like they’re alive again. Right now, they just look dead.”
Battle In Iowa Town Over Censoring LGBTQ Library Books
“More than 300 people have signed a petition to either ban or label and group materials related to homosexual and transgender content in the Orange City Public Library. … The controversy erupted in one of Iowa’s most conservative Republican counties in northwest Iowa after somebody filed a statement of concern to the library about a book on its shelves that featured LGBTQ content.”
Russ Solomon, Founder Of Tower Records, Dead At 92
“A high school dropout who made his first album sale at 16, dealing used jukebox records out of his father’s California drugstore, Mr. Solomon built a music empire that sprawled across more than a dozen countries and nearly 200 stores.”
Trump Nominates New Chairman Of NEH
“[Jon Parrish] Peede, a scholar of Southern literature by training, was publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 2011 to 2016, and has also worked in various capacities at the National Endowment for the Arts, the [National Endowment of the Humanities’] sister agency. He has been serving as the agency’s acting director since May.”