A heart arrhythmia caused pianist Hélène Grimaud to cut short a recital in Los Angeles this week. Grimaud had seen a doctor earlier in the day, and withdrew from the stage after becoming dizzy and faltering at the keyboard. Grimaud “wanted to go back on stage, but couldn’t regain enough strength to complete her program.”
Author: sbergman
Better Get A Taller Podium
Prodigies are nothing new in the music world, but you don’t generally find them on the podium in front of professional orchestras. But this month, a 14-year-old wunderkind from the UK will stand before the orchestra at Moscow’s New Opera Theatre, and conduct the premiere of his own ballet based on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
High On Music
An Italian cellist accompanied by what must have been the world’s most devoted audience climbed 4,500 vertical feet to the summit of Japan’s Mount Fuji last weekend (with his cello,) and then played a recital of solo Bach on the mountaintop.
NEA Chief Trashes Americans’ Ignorance Of Culture
“The leader of the National Endowment for the Arts decried culture as bankrupt and called for the elevation of artists and intellectuals in society at Stanford University’s commencement address on Sunday.” Gioia told the students that “we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts and artists,” and challenged them to overcome the national obsession with pop culture and celebrity.
The Comeback Biennale
Sarah Milroy writes that “most of us who attended the [Venice] Biennale’s three press days last week agreed that this is the best Biennale we had seen in years… Many of the leading nations have made their best curatorial picks in a long time,” and director Robert Storr “is indisputably one of the great curators working today, making exhibitions that display both a high degree of aesthetic discrimination, a depth of historical understanding and an impeccable sense of timing.”
Why We Should Embrace The Casual Reader
Is it possible that those in the cultural sphere want the public to love them a bit too much? Or, put more directly, do we risk alienating those who merely see the arts and literature as a pleasant diversion with unceasing paeans to the glory of cultural engagement? It’s an important question: “If literature is to survive beyond the next few years, assailed as it is by the triple whammy of brutal economics, shrinking attention spans and unrelenting competition from less demanding pastimes, it will survive as much because of book likers as book lovers.”
Keeping The Baby
“Abortion is one of the last taboos in mainstream American film — a no-flyover zone of many years’ standing. No matter how realistically presented, it’s just not something that’s done if you want to keep the sympathy (and ticket sales) of multiplex audiences. That said, each moviegoing generation confronts and/or backs away from the subject in its own fashion, and three current releases have opted to carry to term, whether it makes dramatic sense or not.”
Iran Blasts Rushdie Knighthood
“Iran has criticised the British government for its decision to give a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie. His book The Satanic Verses offended Muslims worldwide and led to Iran issuing a fatwa in 1989, ordering Sir Salman’s execution.” An Iranian official told the international press that “giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is… a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials.”
Trusting Merce
Much has been written and said about Merce Cunningham’s unique style of choreography, and his willingness to let different aspects of a performance progress on their own. “According to [Cunningham’s] rules the choreography, design and music are created separately and may be brought together as late as opening night, with the artists knowing little if anything about one another’s plans save the dimensions of the stage, the number and physical details of the dancers, and the work’s duration in time.”
The Out-Of-Towners
It’s been well documented that Broadway relies on out-of-town ticketbuyers to fill a majority of its seats, especially for big-budget musicals. “In addition to the tickets they buy, those who come to the city just for theater spent more than $2 billion on hotels, restaurants and other expenses in 2004-5… By the millions, day-trippers visit New York every year, to see the biggest Broadway shows. The matinees [in particular] rely on the bus trips.”