Blog

The Whirlwind That Is Peter Sellars

“A mixture of aesthetic sophistication and anarchic, childlike energy, his imagination has had an extraordinary transformational effect on some of the most mainstream works in the repertoire. His controversial stagings of Mozart’s great operas in the 1980s combined high and low cultural references in the conceptual style that has become Sellars’s trademark.”

A 27,000-Year-Old Human Face

The drawing was discovered in France in February. “No one is ever going to put a name to this face. Its owner lived before writing, agriculture, or towns existed, before there were states that kept records, and long before a Greek man named Herodotus decided to write something called “history”. The only reason we can be sure the people who painted in caves during the Ice Age were as human as we are – that is, they used their brains in the same way we do – is that they made art. No other animal makes art. And now the earliest art has a human face – literally.”

British Museum Burns The Midnight Oil

For the first time, the British Museum is keeping its doors open until midnight to accomodate the crowds wanting to see a special exhibition. “More than 140,000 people have visited Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master, since it opened at the end of March. Now the 247-year-old museum has decided to stay open until midnight every Saturday until the show closes later this month.”

What Happened To Rock’s Great Bassists?

“Most of those who operate in music’s lower registers are hardly making the most of their time. The finger-stretching that once characterised the best bass-playing has all but disappeared: these days, rock’s remaining bassists tend to find out what chords the guitarist is playing, memorise what are known as the “root notes” and thrum along.”

Will Jerry Lewis “Nutty Professor” Musical Ever See The Light Of Day?

“They have no composer or lyricist. Those are not minor details when you’re putting on a musical. They also aren’t announcing the name of the book writer(s) yet, which does not suggest Mr. Lewis is working with anyone with any experience at all in doing a musical. They hope to do a tryout at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2007 but apparently, no one’s bothered to tell the Old Globe about this. It’s a little late to be booking for ’07, plus a brand-new musical by new people will probably need more outta-town tryouts than a few weeks in San Diego before it’ll be Manhattan-ready.”

Guillem Joins Sadler’s Wells

Star “ballerina Sylvie Guillem has been appointed associate artist at Sadler’s Wells by artistic director and chief executive Alistair Spalding. The dancer has been a guest principal at the Royal Ballet since 1988 and has appeared with companies such as the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov and La Scala.”

Toronto’s Opera, Ballet Companies – Good Neighbors?

The National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company will soon be sharing a new home. “Based on the experience of the almost three decades it has taken to move two national companies from the 3,200-seat Hummingbird (formerly O’Keefe) Centre to a new home, the two companies’ relationship will continue to be as fraught as you’d expect between a robust, dynamic, operatic sort of character, flushed with pride because it has been the new building’s prime mover, and a cautious, delicate, balletic character, toeing its way onto someone else’s territory.”