South Florida’s Renaissance Chamber Orchestra appears on the versge of going out of business. “With no advance warning, the ensemble failed to show up for its season-opening concert Sunday afternoon at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, leaving about two dozen puzzled audience members standing outside.”
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BritArt Diplomacy Backfires
A plan to try to improve relations between Britain and Morocco has through art has failed after the art offended the Moroccans. “Two of the works, notably an anatomical statement by Tracey Emin, have been withdrawn, while three others by artists including the Chapman brothers have caused offence because of their sexual nature.”
Classical Music/Theatre Hybrid Finds An Audience
“While classical musical organizations increasingly struggle to draw people into the concert hall, and Broadway has more or less resigned itself to being a purveyor of ‘products’ that happen to be musicals, Hershey Felder has developed a hybrid form. He is one of those rare performers who can hold an audience in rapt silence while playing the most intimate Chopin nocturne or prelude, and then bring that same audience together to sing ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,’ the 1940s standard whose melody is based on Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu in C# Minor.”
Oakland Ballet Lives Again
Last year Oakland Ballet canceled its season and laid off dancers because of financial problems. But this is the company’s 40th anniversary, and this weekend was opening night. “Partly to honor the history of the company, and probably to attempt to win back the loyalty of those audience members who had not taken to Karen Brown’s more adventurous programming since coming onboard in 2000, the program that ran Friday through Sunday was mostly a greatest hits kind of affair. That made it impossible to guess where the company may be going, or whether it will survive, but it was a good chance to re-examine the strengths of this plucky East Bay organization, as well as its blind spots.”
Forgotten Saturdays
So few people are watching TV on Saturday nights, the program schedule has become a wasteland. “Saturday has become the forgotten night for broadcasters, who aren’t entirely sure what to do there anymore. They just know it’s not worth spending much to seek an audience that clearly has other plans. The state of network television on Saturday nights has become so dire that ABC has essentially put a prime-time slot up for auction to anyone who has a compelling idea — as long as it’s done very cheaply.”
One Person’s Architecture Prize Is Another’s Tear-Down
“For one glorious, anarchic moment, it looked as if the Scottish Parliament might win this year’s Stirling Prize, the architects’ award for the best new British building, at exactly the moment the public voted that it was the one building in the country it would most like to see knocked down.”
A New Orleans Of Fake History?
“For decades now, the architectural mainstream has accepted the premise that cities can exist in a fixed point in historical time. What results is a fairy tale version of history, and the consequences could be particularly harsh for New Orleans, which was well on its way to becoming a picture-postcard vision of the past before the hurricane struck. Now, with the city at its most vulnerable, such voices threaten to drown out all others.”
Planning For A New Biloxi
Two hundred architects and planners gather in Biloxi to talk about rebuilding. “Over the two and a half hours, the participants grappled with priorities: neighborhood rezoning, downtown, museums and culture, casinos, beachfront, road system, building codes, transit development. They knew they could not do it all, but it was hard not to try. The topics addressed were literally all over the Biloxi map.”
Poet, 79, Wins Literary Award
Landis Everson wins a new literary prize for writers over 50 who have never published a book. “Everson, 79, quiet, pixieish and a little frail after a cataract operation, answered, smiling, ‘Imagine, if you had written a letter to a friend in Chicago and you never had an answer, and you kept writing and writing and not getting any answer back, would you keep writing?’ No matter. Mr. Everson will now receive the Emily Dickinson First Book Award of $10,000, with publication of his book underwritten by the foundation.”
Genre-ly Speaking It’s A Bad Idea
The publishing world is too hung up on genres, insisting that every book be categorized and ranked. “What is it, when Man Booker juries meet, that makes genres ‘inferior’? Why is crime writing, with its ‘very conscious structure’and ability to raise ‘big moral issues’ outside the box of introversion, such a poor relation of ‘literary fiction’?”