London’s museums are famously free to the public, and the scrapping of admission fees has resulted in waves of new visitors. “The new reality is that art and heritage have taken on a central place in a leisure economy previously dominated by sport and Thorpe Park. In that role, for good or ill, art finds itself playing by different rules.”
Author: sbergman
Music Director Salaries Still Rising
The economy may be in the dumps, with smaller orchestras struggling to survive, but the salaries paid to music directors of America’s top orchestras continue to spiral upwards. Incoming Chicago Symphony director Riccardo Muti may be getting more than $2m per season, and even mid-level orchestras are paying their MDs in the high six figures.
The Power Of The Prize
“The Tony is probably the country’s best-known and most eagerly sought theater prize, and the one with the highest stakes: results can make or break a Broadway show. But it is not alone. Everywhere actors and audiences gather, it seems, awards are handed out. And the fallout, much like that after the Tonys, is not always pretty.”
A Young Orchestra Looks To The Future
The New York-based Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas may not have the pedigree of a major orchestra, but it has something more important: a mission: “to explore the largely virgin territory of symphonic music from the New World, to draw a popular audience and to open doors for performers on the threshold of their careers.”
Prophets Of Doom
“End-time thinking – the belief in a world purified by catastrophe – could once be dismissed as a harmless remnant of a more superstitious age. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism, prophets of apocalypse have become a new and very real danger, argues Ian McEwan.”
Naipaul Mugged By A Poem
“Last week the St Lucia poet Derek Walcott used his talent in the pursuit of less lofty ideals as he reignited a simmering row with VS Naipaul by unveiling a stinging attack on the author – in verse… Walcott attacks what he sees as the Trinidadian-born Naipaul’s rejection of his Caribbean heritage in order to win acceptance from the British literary establishment.”
Looking Back At A Seminal Moment In BritArt
It was 20 years ago this summer that “an art show was staged in London’s Docklands that has entered modern art history as a cataclysmic happening.” It was the beginning of Damien Hirst’s BritArt movement, and it changed the UK’s art scene irrevocably, even if few realized it at the time.
Summer Of Klimt
“Rich and strange or luxurious ornament? Whatever your view, Klimt’s work is now so valuable, it’s near impossible to put on a full-scale show. Still, Tate Liverpool has tried… “
Gone With The Wind Is Officially… Well, You Know
“A £4m stage adaptation of the classic novel Gone with the Wind is to go down as one of the biggest flops in West End history after closing more than three months early… [The show] opened with great fanfare but received one of the worst critical maulings in years.”
The Ravinia Way
When Welz Kauffman took over the leadership of Illinois’s Ravinia Festival in 2000, he had his work cut out for him, both fiscally and artistically. “The ensuing years have found Ravinia a bit more theatrically charged and a lot more fun… What’s remarkable is that it’s happening to overwhelming critical and public approval in a culture that pays lip service to but ultimately fears popularization of musical programming.”