A tumultuous year continues apace at the Louisville Orchestra, where the chief operating officer is leaving to become executive director at the Portland Symphony in Maine. Louisville previously accepted the resignation of its own ED in the midst of a bitter battle with the orchestra’s musicians over a proposed reduction in the number of full-time players in the orchestra, before managing to stabilize its perennially precarious finances without such reductions.
Blog
Does “The Daily Show” Hurt Democracy?
“Two university professors have published a study claiming that Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart’ drives down support for political institutions and makes young people more cynical about government.”
Toronto Theatre Awards Top Honors To “Rings”
“The Lord of the Rings took top honours at the 27th annual Dora Mavor Moore Awards last night. Despite some contrary reviews following its March opening, the mega-musical rendering of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy was the clear favourite among Toronto’s theatre cognoscenti, in particular for stagecraft.”
Ratmansky’s Big-Theme Thinking
“The great thing about Russian writers of the late nineteenth century was their willingness to address, directly, the hardest questions of human life. That tradition was inherited by Russian choreographers. Nijinsky in ‘The Rite of Spring’; his sister, Bronislava Nijinska, in ‘Les Noces’; Balanchine in most of what he did—at times, you almost turn away from what they’re saying. It’s too much. With Alexei Ratmansky, you don’t have to turn away, or not yet, but the instinct is the same. Unlike most ballet choreographers working in this country right now, he takes on the great themes—love, grief, marriage, death—and looks them straight in the face.”
Memory In A Jar (It’s Coming)
A few months ago, “researchers at West Virginia University stumbled across a gene in the mouse brain that appears to erase long-term memories. When scientists switched off the gene, the mice developed super-charged memory, able to recall the solution to a maze they’d seen six weeks before, an eternity in mouse time. The discovery is only the most recent in a flurry of breakthroughs that promise a new class of drugs that might help us retain newly learned information and stave off diseases like Alzheimer’s.”
“Phantom” Sets Up Shop In Vegas
Other Broadway musicals might be finding Las Vegas a tough town, but “Phantom” has opened in a lavish production. “It reportedly cost $75m to stage, including $40m to create a replica of the Paris Opera house inside the Venetian hotel.”
The Arts Center All Dressed Up With No Place To Go
The huge Public arts center in West Bromwich, England was supposed to be a wondrous thing to revitalize a town in need. “The Public was meant to open last year, create or safeguard 400 jobs, and attract almost 500,000 visitors. It should have cost £38m. It’s already cost £52m, the largest slice of it from the Arts Council. But the real problem is not so much what the building costs. It’s working out what the Public is for.”
Study: Girls-Only Schools Don’t Help
A new study concludes that “half a century of research ‘has not shown any dramatic or consistent advantages for single-sex education’ for boys or girls. ‘The reason people think single-sex schools are better is because they do well in league tables. But they are generally independent, grammar or former grammar schools and they do well because of the ability and social background of the pupils’.”
Music As Captive To Dance
“If one presumes that one of the goals of becoming a conductor is to deepen your interpretation of the repertory, conducting for ballet does not do that, because it’s about suiting the dance and the demands of the choreographer.”
Simon Schama – Uncommon Storyteller
“Does your typical academic write best-selling 900-page histories of the French Revolution that deliberately omit footnotes? Produce texts mixing scholarship with fiction, to the point where you cannot tell the two apart? Dash off art criticism for magazines like the New Yorker? Teach seditious graduate seminars on Writing History Beyond the Academy”?