“UBS, the Swiss finance house, is ending its sponsorship of the Verbier Festival Orchestra after nine years, 100 million Swiss fracs and an advertising campaign that has given UBS high visibility in the international media as a promoter of youth and musical beauty.”
Author: sbergman
Forget The Renovations – Sydney Should Start Fresh
“What will Sydney get for the estimated $700 million to be spent on the planned overhaul of the Opera Theatre at the Sydney Opera House?” More to the point, wouldn’t the money be better spent building a whole new opera theater that actually functions the way its resident companies need it to?
Cellist Launches “Project Symphony”
A North Carolina cellist with feet in both the classical and pop worlds has launched an annual program to commission a full-scale symphony, perform it with a local orchestra, and use part of the proceeds to commission the next year’s work. “More than half of the proceeds from each symphony will go to a local charity.”
$40m In Arts Money To Flood Miami
The John S. & James L. Knight Foundation has announced $40m in gifts to arts initiatives and cultural institutions in South Florida. “The grants will be awarded in two phases, the first a package of endowment funds totaling $20 million and paid over five years to the Miami Art Museum ($10 million), the Museum of Contemporary Art ($5 million) and the New World Symphony ($5 million).”
The Faces Of The Columbus Downsizing Plan
One of the primary criticisms of the Columbus Symphony’s plan to lay off more than 20 musicians and slash the length of its season has been that the plan ignores the impact such cuts would have on the musicians who have devoted their careers to the orchestra. So the musicians have been working to replace numbers with faces…
Legendary Aussie Opera Journal To Shut Down
“David Gyger, an American-born journalist, and his wife, a former university lecturer, published Opera-Opera each month from an office a few doors from their [Sydney] apartment but have decided that the January issue, Number 361, is their last… The loss means there is no single coherent source providing qualitative information about opera and musical theatre across Australia.”
Perhaps He’s Referring To Ocean’s Thirteen
“George Clooney, one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars who earns up to £15 million a movie, has taken a swipe at the film industry, saying he believes the golden age of cinema is dead… Clooney places the glory years of cinema firmly between 1964 and 1976 when he says studios produced almost a masterpiece a month.”
How Pixar Became A Standard Bearer
Pixar is well known for having changed animation forever, by hiring the top talent in the business and spending lavishly on the best technology money could buy. Of course, relying on computers inevitably means dealing with their obsolescence, which often comes astonishingly quickly.
Audiences Stunned To Find Sweeney Todd A Musical
“Nowhere does the [movie trailer] mention the fact that Sweeney Todd is a musical. In fact, it goes out of its way to conceal the fact that the movie is entirely sung, save for a few snippets of dialogue… Stung at paying to see a collection of tortuously constructed Stephen Sondheim tunes when they were expecting a gory Gothic thriller, a fair proportion of cinema audiences has been walking out of Sweeney Todd.”
Could Arts Council Cuts Really Benefit UK Writers?
The UK Arts Council’s decision to overhaul its funding process has set the council’s directors on their heels as public and media outrage mount. But the council’s literature chief says that writers actually will be getting a good deal when all the dust settles.