One day after she was quoted in the New York Times saying that Metropolitan Opera director Peter Gelb was “phasing her out,” soprano Ruth Ann Swenson received a warm ovation from the Met crowd attending her performance in a Handel opera. “But if she looked at the back of the orchestra, Swenson might have seen a possible cause for the Met’s reduced commitment: several rows of mostly empty seats. She doesn’t have a big recording company advertising her heavily, and other sopranos are better box office.”
Author: sbergman
More Than The Sum Of Its Letters
The ubiquitous typeface known as Helvetica turns 50 this year. Wait, wait – you only think you don’t care! “Helvetica is one of those typefaces that everybody knows, everybody sees, but they don’t really see it at the same time because it’s so good at its job. It communicates efficiently and quickly without imposing itself.”
Preserving A Country’s Soul Amid The Rubble
There may be no sadder job than that of director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad. “After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, looters pillaged and burned the library. Now, on the brink of the fourth anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s fall, and several weeks into a new security offensive, [Saad] Eskander and his staff are struggling to preserve the fragments of Iraq’s ancient heritage at a place he calls the ‘historical memory of the country.'”
The 96-Year-Old Rookie
Author Harry Bernstein is 96, and he just saw his first book published last month. The nonagenarian neophyte has been enjoying glowing reviews, and reveling in the novelty of his situation. “In a publishing world where first books by 20-something wunderkinds are often dissected as much for their authors’ photographs as for their prose, Mr. Bernstein is a refreshing antidote.”
Tech TV
Serious, jaw-dropping special effects used to be a luxury that only movie studios could afford. But advances in computer technology have allowed television to get in on the fun, and some new shows now rely on CGI effects that would have been prohibitively expensive, or even impossible, just a couple of years ago.
Tate Modern Commissions New Lobby Sculpture
“The Colombian artist Doris Salcedo will be the first artist from outside Europe or North America to undertake the challenge of the annual Unilever commission in Tate Modern’s vast central space… All her art is underpinned by a sense of the history of justice. But at the same time, it is very quiet. It’s not about sending out direct messages, though she is a very passionate individual.”
Broadway Star Told To Take A Week Off
“Christine Ebersole is giving a performance that critics hailed as one of the great star turns in recent Broadway history” in Grey Gardens. But the role is apparently so demanding that Ebersole has begun missing performances because of exhaustion, “causing the show’s producers to fret that she might jeopardize her chances of winning the Tony if she’s unable to do the show eight times a week. They met with her in her dressing room one night last month and told her to take a week off so she could pull herself together before the spring run-up to the Tonys, which are handed out in June.”
Lebrecht: “Synthetic” Classical Throttling The Industry
Classical doomsayer (and AJ blogger) Norman Lebrecht is out with a new book, in which he blames classical music’s decline in popularity on the overblown marketing machine that makes superstars out of crossover musicians of dubious ability. “In the Nineties, the classical side of the record industry suffered a fatal loss of nerve and substituted real classics with synthetics. These synthetics have finally sunk the ship.”
A Conductor Made For Radio
Mark Swed has been taking in “The MTT Files,” Michael Tilson Thomas’s new radio program that promises to bring the general public back into the classical music fold. “The series is personal. It recognizes that music demands paying attention, not multi-tasking. It takes great leaps of imagination, which can be accomplished much more effectively on radio than on television. And given that MTT is an inspired mimic, his voice brings to life the likes of Stravinsky and Heifetz. He can also be very funny.”
Apparently, Music Isn’t Real Big In New Hampshire
Little more than a month after the New Hampshire Symphony announced that it was canceling the remainder of its season, Opera New Hampshire is canceling its lone spring production, citing “lower than anticipated funding from subscriptions, ticket sales, sponsorships and other sources.”