The top executive at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts is resigning to lead an arts festival in her native Toronto. Janice Price has led the Kimmel since 2002, the year the center opened.
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The Secret Competition
Imagine winning a piano competition you had no idea you’d entered. Now imagine that your victory comes with $300,000. The Gilmore Artist Award, presented every four years and won this year by Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter, might be the most labor-intensive competition in existence, but more for its organizers than the contestants. “Six jury members travel the world, listening to pianists identified by an international panel as exceptionally gifted and deserving of a higher profile. To get an idea of the pianists’ range, the jury members attend orchestra concerts, recitals and chamber music performances, without ever telling the pianists they are being considered for the award.”
D.C.’s Grand Dame of Ballet Dies
One of America’s foremost dance educators and the founder of the Washington School of Ballet has died aged 96. “Mary Day identified and developed so much world-class talent at the ballet school that her former students dance in virtually every sizable company in the nation.”
Arts Slashed In Wake Of NJ Budget Impasse
“In the late-night frenzy to craft a budget deal this week, lawmakers cut the budget of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts an additional 5 percent, to $19.1 million, while adding money to pet projects in Montclair, Camden and Newark… Organizations currently receiving state aid should expect cuts of more than 15 percent as less money will be shared by more groups.”
CultureGrrl: A Fake Duccio? Really?
Lee Rosenbaum takes a look at claims by one scholar that the Metropolitan Museum’s Duccio (for which it paid $50 million last year) is a fake. “None of this proves that the painting is a fake from the 19th century, as Beck somewhat recklessly claims, or even that it’s not by Duccio. The Met’s conservation lab has done a technical examination of the painting that it says provides additional support for the attribution. It should release those findings in detail (including any attempts to date the painting scientifically), to help clarify these matters.”
Schiff: Dissing Mozart Not Right
Andras Schiff is tired of some people saying they don’t care for Mozart. “Why is it that certain people get such immense pleasure from this kind of iconoclasm? Does attacking the greatest artists in history make them feel better? It’s good to enjoy the benefits of democracy, such as freedom of speech – let’s remember the recent affair with the Danish cartoons and not ever take it for granted. But Mozart’s greatest admirers included Haydn, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Nietzsche, Debussy, and Britten. Putting this list against that of a few detractors, whose side would you like to be on?”
What Makes A Shakespeare Folio So Valuable?
The earliest collected edition of Shakespeare’s works is being sold at aucion and is expected to sell for between £2.5m and £3.5 million. “What makes a book so valuable? And why would even a multi-millionaire be prepared to pay such a sum? However ludicrous the prices fetched by paintings, you can see why a wealthy person or institution would be willing to stump up. There it is on the wall: beautiful, unique, luminous. But the First Folio is not aesthetically delectable. The print quality is not wonderful and there are many printing errors. It contains an artwork, the Martin Droeshout engraving that is our only certain likeness of the bard, but it is a cack-handed portraiture. And the book is not unique. It is not even rare.”
Michener: We’ve Lost A Major Artist
Charles Michener mourns Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. “On Monday, July 3, the most luminous voice I’ve ever heard was extinguished when the American mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died at the age of 52. Everything this astonishing woman did was almost too much to bear. As with Maria Callas, whom she matched in eruptive intensity, Hunt Lieberson’s performances took you so deeply into what she was singing about that the experience verged on voyeurism.”
Trudeau, The Opera
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was an operatic figure with a very big life. And now there’s to be an opera about him. “Trudeau: Long March/Shining Path is being written by librettist George Elliott Clarke and jazz composer D.D. Jackson. Clarke, a poet acclaimed for his Whylah Falls and author of the novel George and Rue, has written two earlier operas: Beatrice Chancy, about slaves in Nova Scotia, and Québécité, which is the story of interracial lovers.”
De Waart To Perth?
Will Edo De Waart be the next music director of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra? “De Waart, a former music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra and Netherlands Opera, would be quite a catch for a band in such a far-flung town as Perth. (The city is roughly 2,000 miles from Sydney and 2,400 miles from Singapore.) But de Waart’s career has been concentrated in that part of the world lately: in 2004 he finished up a very successful 10-year stint as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony and went directly to the Hong Kong Philharmonic, where he is now artistic director.”