When the London Symphony announced that the dynamic Russian conductor Valerie Gergiev had agreed to become its next music director, the reaction from around the music world was uniformly positive. “Snaring the world’s most charismatic conductor has made the LSO the envy of the orchestral world. But like most marriages the relationship is based on a shrewd calculation of mutual interests… What the orchestra needed was someone capable of matching and maintaining its marketprofile, not just at its Barbican base but through tours, recordings and media visibility… As for Gergiev, tying a knot with London’s best-connected orchestra represents a strategic west European foothold – a grade above his longstanding Rotterdam Philharmonic post but without making more demands on his time.”
Blog
A Playwright For All Seasons
Harold Pinter is 75 this week, and Alastair McCauley says that the playwright’s long career has been a gift not only to audiences, but to actors and critics as well. “The pauses in Pinter are like the spaces between people in the paintings of Cezanne, Seurat, or Picasso: expressive, charged, firm. They dramatise the tension between characters… When staging his own plays, he doesn’t let his actors into secrets: the mystery is there for them, too. But actors have said he gives them confidence, not least because he knows how vulnerable they can feel.”
Giving A New Meaning to Cubism
Britain’s Tate Modern museum has unveiled a massive new work of installation art by Turner-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread consisting of 14,000 identical white boxes. The work, aptly named “Embankment,” was commissioned specifically for the Tate’s enormous Turbine Hall, which measures 500 feet in length with a 115-foot ceiling. So what do 14,000 white boxes look like? Rather like a bunch of oversized piles of sugar cubes, as it turns out.
Harry Potter & The Half-Wit Rent-A-Cop
“A security guard who tried to sell stolen copies of the latest Harry Potter novel has admitted theft and possessing an imitation gun.” The guard, who removed two copies of J.K. Rowling’s insanely popular book from a warehouse and later attempted to sell them to British newspapers, still denies ever pointing the gun at a reporter for the tabloid Sun, as the journalist claims.
Banville Wins ’05 Booker
John Banville has become the first Irish author since 1993 to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for literature, in the most closely contested judging the contest has seen in years. Banville’s novel, The Sea, just beat out Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, with the chairman of the judging panel casting the decisive vote. “Banville’s win was a neat reversal of fortune. In 1989 his novel, The Book Of Evidence, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost out to Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day.”
Atlanta S.O. Predicts $2 Billion Arts Center Impact
Trumpeting the economic impact of the arts has become a tried-and-true promotional technique over the past several years, and this week, the Atlanta Symphony took its turn at self-congratulation, releasing a consultant’s report that predicts a $2 billion boost to the Georgia economy upon completion of the orchestra’s new $300 million concert hall. “[That] includes $537 million during construction and $1.45 billion during the first 10 years of operation. It should generate $116 million in tax revenues and 2,100 new jobs through 2020, says the report.”
The Hardest Fall
For more than two decades, violinist Stewart Kitts held a prestigious leadership position in the Florida Orchestra, and was one of the Tampa Bay area’s brightest cultural lights. He had come from a musical family, and was in the process of raising three children of his own. But somewhere along the line, Kitts got divorced, began dating a drug addict, and became addicted to crack cocaine himself. Less than two years later, his arrest record reads like that of an inner-city gang member, and he has been officially dismissed from the orchestra following a failed intervention last season.
Why The Stirling Prize Doesn’t Work
The UK’s Stirling Prize for architecture is to be awarded this week. “Beyond the difficulty of choosing between this year’s nominees, something about the prize that aspires to do for buildings what the Man Booker does for books, and the Turner does for art, fails to add up. The real problem faced by the Stirling Prize since its launch in 1996 has been its failure to come up with a coherent sense of what the award is for, and then to stick with it.”
Chuck Close On Painting:
‘Painting for me is like putting rocks in your shoes before you go out on a journey. It’s about making things a little more difficult for yourself so that you know where you are going, but you never really know how you’re going to get there. They used to say that Pollock didn’t know what his next painting was going to look like, but he did know what he was going to do in the studio that day. Me, I know what my next painting is going to look like, but I don’t know what I’m going to do in the studio to get there. I’m just trying to inch nearer all the time.”
Turkish Writer Speaks Out
“Last February, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk, told a Swiss newspaper that ‘thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and almost no one dares talk about it. Therefore, I do.’ This caused a furor within Turkey, with liberals defending Pamuk’s right to free speech and/or the critical importance of speaking out about this particular matter, and reactionaries branding Pamuk a traitor, burning his books, and issuing the anonymous death threats that have forced the writer to flee his country.”