James Levine’s shoulder injury will require surgery, forcing the maestro to cancel the remainder of this season’s engagements with the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony. He hopes to be fully recovered in time for the BSO’s summer season at Tanglewood. Both organizations are scrambling to find replacements.
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The Great Conductor Bug Of ’06
What is it this year with the conductors? If they’re not falling off the podium (James Levine) or losing their sense of balance (Daniel Barenboim), they’re coming down with shingles (Seiji Ozawa) or bronchitis (Christoph von Dohnanyi). “Have the terrorists (or maybe a cabal of ambitious assistant conductors) launched a stealth attack against Western classical music?”
Philanthropy As Local PR
When arts groups go looking for funding, they traditionally look to local companies and individuals with deep pockets. But some huge global corporations have been getting into the arts funding game in a big way recently, partly as a way of showing their commitment to local communities even as they struggle against the perception of “big box” retailers as generic and lifeless.
It’s Your Museum. Play With It.
“The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is about to take its Web site where no museum has gone before. Where that is isn’t absolutely clear, but it merits getting excited about. The so-called ‘online national design museum’ promises to open the museum and its vast collection to visitors anywhere in the world. What’s more, if development can keep up with vision, the site will turn museumgoers into participants in a bold cultural experiment.” Specifically, visitors to the site will be able to add and manipulate content, Wiki-style. Will it work? No one really knows.
Still Heard, If Not Seen
James Levine’s absence from the touring podium of the Boston Symphony is, of course, eminently noticable as the orchestra works its way down the East Coast under fill-in David Robertson. But Philip Kennicott says that Levine’s most important work has never been what he does in concert, anyway, and as a result, his actual physical presence isn’t required for his influence to be heard.
Canadian Stopgap For Billy?
“Is Billy Elliot, the biggest hit now on the London stage, going to open in Toronto before New York? That depends on whom you talk to.” Promoters are downplaying the idea after it was initially reported in a New York tabloid, but according to sources in Toronto, many performers are being told to “keep their schedules clear” for the show.
Youth In Charge
The job of ballet conductor is far more than a simple stick-waving exercise. Synchronizing music and dance is a tremendously difficult undertaking, and it takes a cool head and a keen eye to adjust an entire orchestra to the sometimes unpredictable whims of the performers on stage. So it was a bit of a surprise when San Francisco Ballet tapped an unusually young man to be its new pit conductor, but 37-year-old Martin West loves a challenge, and initial reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.
Homeless New Orleans Publisher Auctions Off His Treasures
“An auction of first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski raised $225,000 in San Francisco to benefit a publisher left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.”
Fox Steps Out Of The Freying Pan
Disgraced memoirist James Frey’s Hollywood dreams may be as dead as his credibility. “Before Oprah Winfrey castigated Frey for ‘duping’ her with his book earlier this year, the writer sold Fox a script for a one-hour, apparently tongue-in-cheek crime drama.” But in the wake of all the negative publicity surrounding Frey, “Fox has quietly killed the pilot.”
Anna Moffo, 73
Glamorous soprano Anna Moffo, who starred on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera for more than two decades, has died at her home in New York, aged 73. Moffo’s career was memorable but short – her voice deteriorated badly and forced her to retire from the stage while still in her 40s.