“All you have to do is consult the list of gold-medal winners from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s opera course to know that this programme is the real deal. Bryn Terfel scooped it in 1989; this year’s winner, Anna Stéphany, has already made her mark by winning the highly regarded Kathleen Ferrier Award. In between, the number of distinguished graduates from recent years is more than impressive.”
Blog
NJSO In The Black, But Questions Remain
The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, which has been hit in recent years by deficits and a national scandal involving financier Herbert Axelrod’s sale to the orchestra of a collection of valuable string instruments, has announced a surplus for the 2004-05 season, and increases in ticket revenue and donor giving. “But the orchestra is not clear of its primary threat: a debt load of about $19 million, composed of a $3.6 million line of credit it has not paid down in three years, and the balance owed on bonds and notes payable to creditors for the instruments. The orchestra restructured its debt to pay interest only for nine months last season, saving about $780,000 in cash… In all, the orchestra has made headway, but the financial report showed a seesaw of good and bad news.”
The Open Library, Open For All
Brewster Kahle “made his name indexing and storing the web in his Internet Archive. His non-profit organisation, stationed in an unassuming colonial home in San Francisco’s Presidio, has moved on to grab and upload all kinds of media: public domain films, audio archives, and amateur endeavours such as Project Gutenberg, which has been painstakingly hand-typing public domain texts since the 70s. Now he has taken the idea of digitising the text of books one step further, and is storing not just the text, but, incredibly, high-resolution snapshots of book pages, good enough to reproduce every fold, blotch and texture of the world’s catalogue of public domain works on your screen.”
Arts Funding? Sorry, We’ve Got A City To Run.
The two candidates in Detroit’s mayoral race freely admit that they don’t know a thing about the city’s arts scene, and both are hesitant to commit to any arts funding in the future. The sitting mayor killed off the Department of Culture, Arts, and Tourism last year as part of a plan to battle a massive budget deficit, and Detroit has plenty of civic problems that take priority over the arts. “Those in the arts and cultural communities, who are facing funding woes such as a $1.5-million cut to the Detroit Historical Museums and a $5-million cut to the Detroit Zoo, appreciated the candidates’ attention but remain skeptical.”
Musicians Strike Radio City
“Musicians for the Radio City Music Hall’s famous Christmas Spectacular went on strike Wednesday and announced they had the support of other unions at the landmark [New York] theater.” With the annual show scheduled to open tonight, the strike was timed to cause maximum disruption. Nonetheless, the success of the strike may hinge on whether the show’s other unionized workers – the stagehands and the famous dancers known as The Rockettes – honor the picket line. Radio City is planning to go ahead with a prerecorded soundtrack, and the stagehands have yet to commit to a sympathy strike. The Rockettes announced that they would not cross the picket line, but Radio City says they have a no-strike clause in their contract, and are expected to perform.
At Least Someone Will Get To Play It
A rare violin once owned by 19th-century virtuoso and composer Nicolo Paganini was bought at auction Tuesday by the Moscow-based Violin Art Foundation, which plans to loan it out to the winner of its prestigious annual competition. The Foundation paid just over $1 million for the instrument, which was made in 1720 by the Italian master Carlo Bergonzi. The sale price was a record for a Bergonzi violin.
Ollie The Bear
Oliver Knussen has come a long way since bursting onto the scene as a composing and conducting prodigy at age 14. “Bearded, toweringly tall and nearly as large around, Knussen, 53, lumbers into a room like a slightly disoriented bear. He looks as if he’d just as soon as be eating honey from a crockery jar as writing one of his fastidious musical miniatures.” He has also developed something of a reputation for missing compositional deadlines. However, despite the complexity of some of his work, he has become one of the UK’s most well-known composers, and he is an increasingly welcome guest on the podium of various major orchestras, probably for the quiet passion he brings to the work.
How Recording Has Changed Music
“Recording has directed performance style into a search for greater precision and perfection, with a consequent loss of spontaneity and warmth. Various expressive devices once common in the early twentieth century have been almost outlawed: “portamento” (sliding from one note to another on a stringed instrument); playing the piano with the hands not quite together (Philip calls this dislocation); arpeggiating chords (not playing all the notes of the chord at the same time but one after another), and flexibility of tempo.”
Google Print Debuts
The book digitizing project throws texts of books up on the web in searchable form.
August Wilson On Writing A Play
“Once you get the first scene done (or it might be the fourth scene in the play), then you can sort of begin to see other possibilities. Just like working in collages, you shift it around and organize it: This doesn’t go here; that speech doesn’t really belong to that person, it belongs to this person. So, very much like Romare Bearden, you move your stuff around on the pages until you have a composition that satisfies you, that expresses the idea of something and then—bingo—you have a play.”