Enough touring orchestras and soloists are now stopping to perform in the United Arab Emirates that, said NSO Symphony Orchestra founder and CEO Janet Hassouneh, “I feel it’s the right time to pass on the baton to these new purveyors, so that audiences can enjoy ever-more outstanding musical experiences.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.15.18
Pianist Menahem Pressler at age 94: Fragile, fallible but still a credit to his legacy?
Human beings are living longer – and so are performing artists. The question of when they retire gracefully isn’t going away, and if anything, will only require more finesse as musical legends have increasingly few reasons to retire. … read more
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2018-02-15
Obama Drama: Unveiled, Hung and Exiled (with video)
“It’s kind of amazing to think that [the Obama portraits] will be living next to the other portraits of all of the other presidents and first ladies,” Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator at the Whitney Museum, gushed about the latest presidential commissions by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Sad to say, Ru, Barack Obama is not actually “next to the other portraits” of the U.S. Presidents. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-02-15
Confabulation: Why People Make Up Stories To Explain Things
“When we confabulate, we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story. As we are not aware that our story is fictional, this is very different from a lie: we have no intention to deceive. So in confabulation there is a mismatch between what we aim to do (tell a true story) and what we end up doing (tell a fictional story). We tend to confabulate when we are asked to explain our choices because we don’t always know the factors responsible for our choices. Yet, when asked why we made a choice, we offer an explanation.”
Theatre’s Mini-Boom In Adaptations Of Movies
The genre has moved far beyond Disney’s screen-to-stage extravaganzas, Hairspray, and The Producers: in London alone, there are currently live-theatre versions of Network, Jubilee, Fanny and Alexander, and The Exorcist. Says director Chris Goode, “I think what has happened over the last 10 years or so is that we’ve stopped having the idea that theater is essentially a literary form.”
A #BlackLivesMatter Song Cycle For One Of The World’s Leading Tenors
“The poet who wrote the words can be confrontational. The composer is known for cutting-edge jazz. The singer specializes in ornately written operas from another century. Suffice it to say that Cycles of My Being, a new song cycle by poet Terrance Hayes and composer Tyshawn Sorey – prompted by police brutality against African Americans – won’t be anything typical. Or demure.” Says Lawrence Brownlee, who conceived the project for Opera Philadelphia, “Hold on to your seats. We don’t know what’s going to happen. But something is going to happen.”
Meet The Man Who Teaches Movie Stars Playing Ballerinas How To Dance
“How does someone go from a New York City Ballet corps member to training Hollywood A-listers like Natalie Portman, Rooney Mara and Jennifer Lawrence? By getting injured, says Kurt Froman.”
Judy Chicago At 78, And Her Long Career Making Space For Fellow Female Artists
“Her style, like The Dinner Party, is flamboyant and groovy and uncategorizable. She wore jeans, a leopard-print silk shirt under a black vest embroidered with sequins and a double strand of gold beads. Her lipstick was purple, her curly hair dyed a reddish-pink, with tinted glasses to match, giving her a dreamy, psychedelic look. But the eyes peering out from behind those glasses were sharp and commanding.”
How Judy Chicago Made ‘The Dinner Party’ Over Five Long, Strenuous Years
“Chicago acknowledged that she’d need help to realize her full vision, so she began to enlist research assistants and scores of volunteers to help with production, whether embroidering, painting ceramic plates, or scrawling the names of historical figures onto the 2,304 hand-cast porcelain tiles that would make up the floor. … Some 400 women and men would lend a hand before she completed the work in 1979.”
Why Agnes Gund Sold Her Lichtenstein Painting To Fund Prison Reform
“There have been really good articles showing that if you take a white man that’s in prison for, say, stealing from a store,” the philanthropist tells a reporter, “and he has the same record, the same number of years incarcerated, the same good behaviour as a black man that’s done the exact same thing, the white person gets paroled sooner.”
Duluth, Minn. Schools Drop ‘Huck Finn’, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ From Curriculum
“School administrators said the decision was made in an effort to be considerate of all students after concerns about the [racist terms used in the books] were raised over the years. The books are not banned, however, and will still be available for optional reading.” Said one high school English teacher in the city of To Kill a Mockingbird, “I think it’s dated. That book now to me reads like it was written to explain racism to primarily a white audience. My African-American population doesn’t need to have racism explained to them.”