“Ms. Nilsson sang the operas of Richard Strauss and made a specialty of Puccini’s ‘Turandot,’ but it was Wagner who served her career and whom she served as no other soprano since the days of Kirsten Flagstad. A big, blunt woman with a wicked sense of humor, Ms. Nilsson brooked no interference from Wagner’s powerful and eventful orchestral writing.”
Blog
Will Frey’s Movie Change After Charges?
“A film version of James Frey’s best-selling addiction memoir ‘A Million Little Pieces’ could need a rehab of its own after a story posted Sunday on the muckraking Web site the Smoking Gun raised serious questions about the veracity of the author’s gritty true-life account.”
Back To School
Critic Julia Keller never liked Jonathan Swift back in college, when his “lofty sarcasm [and] misanthropic superiority” seemed at odds with her vision of what literature ought to be. The wonderful thing about graduating from college, of course, is that you’re no longer required to delve into the work of writers you hate. But Keller is diving back in, auditing a Swift course at a Chicago university in order to “engage in an intellectual arm-wrestling match with Swift, my old nemesis, and report on the results.” Vegas oddsmakers are currently laying 3-to-2 odds on Swift.
Savvy Marketing Or Copyright Infringment?
A copyright dispute appears to have broken out between Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam and the publisher of a collection of “luxury magazines” aimed at high-end consumers in cities across the U.S. Beam first wrote about the company and its magazines last September, and he was more than a bit derisive. But now, the publisher appears to have pulled a few select quotes from Beam’s article to use as promotional material for the magazines, an action which Beam calls “blatant copyright infringement,” especially since the references to Beam’s column “omitted what we call the lead, which referred to [the] magazine as ‘a 352-page doorstop’ filled with ‘puffy, party-oriented proto-journalism.'”
Spoiling For A Fight
It’s always been an article of faith among movie and TV critics that you don’t reveal a big plot twist before the audience has a chance to see it for themselves. But what to do today, in a world of on-demand media in which some viewers will go berserk over a critic’s “spoiler,” even if it comes weeks or months after the show in question first aired? Joanna Weiss is sick of all the whining: “Well, I contend that what happens on TV the night before constitutes news, and is thus fit for a newspaper. That’s not to say we can’t be nice and offer a small grace period… But beyond that, facts are fair game.”
Lestat Slammed By Critics In Pre-Broadway Tryout
The splashy, big-budget, supposedly Broadway-bound musical version of Anne Rice’s bestselling vampire novels has run squarely into a wall of critical derision in its tryout run in San Francisco. “The creative team has nearly driven a wooden stake through the heart of author Anne Rice’s much-loved Vampire Chronicles,” says one Bay Area daily, and that’s one of the kinder reviews. San Francisco’s largest daily summed up the brickbats nicely: “Didactic, disjointed, oddly miscast, confusingly designed and floundering in an almost unrelentingly saccharine score by Elton John, Lestat opened Sunday as the latest ill-conceived Broadway hopeful.”
Is The Director Sinking Lestat?
“Theater people are whispering that [Lestat director Rob Jess Roth] has to be replaced by a stronger and more imaginative director if [the show] is going to have a chance in New York… Roth has a poor track record on Broadway. He directed Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, a third-rate production that no one will confuse with Julie Taymor’s great staging of The Lion King. He was given a shot at directing Aida, but was fired after his production opened to poor reviews out of town. His third musical — The Opposite of Sex — was aborted out of town, also because of poor notices.”
Prickly Pinchas
Pinchas Zukerman is having an unusually newsworthy season, even for him. Always an outspoken critic of people and music he sees as “mediocre” (don’t get him started on the period performance movement), Zukerman has been taking some heat of his own lately for his decision to pull out of what remains of his obligations as music director of the Ottawa-based National Arts Centre Orchestra’s 2005-06 season. Zukerman calls the journalists questioning his decision “mediocrities,” but he admits to what has long been rumored within the industry: that his NACO is not a happy place at the moment. “In every orchestra, in every institution that has climbed to prominence quickly there’s always going to be a few rotten apples. And they have created an atmosphere that has to be eradicated, quite frankly.”
New Team In Place At SF Opera
The new general director of the San Francisco Opera, David Gockley, has moved quickly to bring in his own administrative staff, appointing to two high positions men he had worked with in his last job at the Houston Grand Opera. Gockley took over the directorship from industry icon Pamela Rosenberg late last year. Rosenberg has moved on to a job with the Berlin Philharmonic.
What Happened To Cantonese?
“Cantonese, a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions, was never the dominant language of China. But it came to dominate the Chinatowns of North America because the first immigrants came from the Cantonese-speaking southern province of Guangdong, where China first opened its ports to foreigners centuries ago. But over the last three decades, waves of Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants have diluted the influence of both the Cantonese language and the pioneering Cantonese families who ran Chinatowns for years.”