The Baltimore Symphony, which has lately been plowing through controversies like most orchestras go through Beethoven, is expected to select a self-made millionaire and venture capitalist as its next chairman of the board. The hope is that Michael Bronfein can help right the BSO’s financial ship as the organization attempts to put behind it the controversy generated when conductor Marin Alsop was appointed music director without the approval of the musicians.
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We Vote For Whichever One Doesn’t Remind Us Of Braveheart
Scotland’s national orchestra is making a push to choose a new national anthem for the region, to supplement the UK-wide anthem, “God Save The Queen,” which doesn’t have a great deal of resonance with Scots. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has recorded renditions of five contending songs (not surprisingly, two are based on poems by Robert Burns, and a third is a bagpipe tune,) and is inviting Scots around the world to vote on its website over the next month.
MIA’s Grand Opening
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has unveiled a major expansion, and officials are hopeful that the ability to display a larger percentage of its collection will elevate MIA, which has always been considered a respected midsize institution, to the rank of top U.S. museums. “The new Target wing designed by Michael Graves is devoted to 20th-century art. There also are many more galleries for non-Western art, including six new Japanese galleries and one for art from the Pacific Islands.”
Major Asian Collection To Have Homes In New York, Minnesota
The largest privately held collection of Japanese art outside of Japan is being split up and donated after its owner’s death to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mary Griggs Burke’s well-known collection is 900 pieces strong, and has long been coveted by museums around the U.S. The announcement comes as the Minneapolis museum is unveiling its new expansion, which includes a major increase in gallery space devoted to Asian art.
Wales Center Resists Demands To Cancel Springer Opera
The Wales Millennium Centre says it won’t bow to demands from religious leaders to cancel performances of “Jerry Springer, The Opera.” “Monday’s letter, signed by representatives of more than 100 churches in Cardiff and across south Wales, called on the venue to cancel the show. ‘Christians in Cardiff and south Wales are deeply offended that a national venue paid for by our tax money is being used to mock God and his son, Jesus Christ, in the most vulgar way’.”
The Accidental Vandals
The Bureau of Land Management, which manages the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, is trying to send a cautionary message to a growing number of visitors who are loving some ancient settlements to death. ‘We’re starting to call them the ‘accidental vandals.’ They lean on the walls to get a good picture. They take a corn cob with them, a pottery shard’.”
Going Global For Nutty Professor?
“The Globe has very broadly discussed Jerry’s project. We love Jerry, who, of course, worked with (artistic director) Jack O’Brien on ‘Damn Yankees.’ I’ve supported his effort and advised him on what it would take to get the project to the Globe. If the project moves along and it makes sense for Jerry and the Globe to work together, that would be terrific.”
American Abroad Comes Home With A Mission
“For the past few decades, James Conlon has been the classical music world’s most noted American abroad. He’s held musical posts in Rotterdam, Cologne and most recently Paris, where he spent nine acclaimed years as principal conductor of the Paris Opera; his main foothold in his homeland has been the Cincinnati May Festival, a choral festival he’s led since 1979. But now, at 56, Conlon is coming home. He’s taken over the helm of the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony, and in the fall he’ll succeed Kent Nagano as music director of the Los Angeles Opera.”
Short Stuff
Film shorts have traditionally been considered a loss leader. But “low-cost cameras and desktop editing have expanded the field beyond Hollywood aspirants to everyone from hobbyists to experimental artists. And online, sites like Atomfilms, iFilm, Clipland and Amazefilms, among dozens of others, have showcased shorts, transforming them from advertisements for one’s self to a form of self-expression in its own right. And along the way, they’ve actually managed what was long thought to be impossible: Making a little money along the way.”
Framing Zarqawi – An Image For…
“So will this image, given a strange dignity by its prominent frame, be a defining image of the war? Not likely. Its primary function is forensic. It proves, in an age of skepticism (heightened by a three-year history of official claims about the war turning out to be false), that Zarqawi is indeed dead. But beyond that, the image has little power. Indeed, as with so many images in this war, it is loaded with the potential to backfire.”