“Like a summer earthquake, Millennium Park has tilted the playing field of Chicago-area classical music festivals, and Ravinia is clearly feeling the shock waves. The city of Chicago’s stunning $475-million cultural playground and outdoor recreation center — home to the Grant Park Music Festival since its opening in July 2004 — has been pulling in capacity crowds to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion for most of the Grant Park Orchestra’s 30 concerts this season. At the same time, Ravinia continues to grapple with a decline in pavilion ticket sales to the 22 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts it presented.”
Blog
When Sears Sold Picassos
So Costco is selling Picassos online. “But no one seems to remember that what Costco is doing is nothing new. Forty years ago, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was selling Picassos and Chagalls, not to mention Rembrandts, Dürers, Goyas, Whistlers, Mondrians and Wyeths, all of them bearing the imprimatur of a celebrated connoisseur who was better known for making such grisly movies as The Fly and House of Wax.”
Ravinia, Grant Park See Increased Audiences
Chigao’s Grant Park Festival has had a great summer, with solid crowds. “The rush to become a member of the Grant Park Music Festival, which guarantees access to 2,000 of the pavilion’s 4,000 fixed seats, began last season. In 2004, the festival stopped taking memberships six weeks before the Pritzker Pavilion opened, fearing they couldn’t accommodate so many new members. This summer, the festival sold out its basic and premium memberships, priced at $60 and $150 per person respectively. With 3,764 members, 30 percent more than 2004, it stopped taking new members in mid-June.”
Newsweeklies Fade At The Newsstand
America’s newsweeklies are losing single-copy newstand sales at an alarming rate. “The decreases again raise the question of how general-interest publications can hold on to their audiences in a 24-hour cable news and Internet environment while competing against increasingly popular entertainment, pop culture and specialized magazines.”
Dedicated Cleveland Chorus Raises Money To Work
The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus is traveling with the orchestra in Europe to festivals this month. But costs for the chorus’s travel aren’t covered by the hosting organizations. “Not even bread will be supplied to the 152 choristers – of the total personnel of 165 – who will travel this month” and so fundraising is required…
Library Closure = A Disturbing Turn For Culture
Norman Lebrecht decries the closing of London’s Whitechapel Library. “It illuminates the glaring failures of English education and integration over the past generation, and its transferral to an ‘ideas store’, half a mile away beside a Sainsbury’s supermarket, says all you dreaded to know about the confusion of culture with consumerism that has overtaken the governing classes of this country with such devastating social consequences. Need to know cause and effect for street crime and drink culture? Start with the wrecking of our library system.”
Artifact Looting Continues In Iraq
“We were outraged at what happened and more so at what’s continuing to happen at the sites. Numbers of impoverished Iraqis are willing to pillage for antiquities in order to feed their families. It’s 200 people a night with equipment. Look at Umma: It’s like a lunar landscape [from the digging.]”
Why Is Classical Music Dismissed As Elitist?
There’s a prevailing wisdom that “classical music is elitist, inaccessible, stuffy, boring and uncool. As a mass-market view, it would be wonderful to be able to turn it into something less dismissive, more embracing, more informed. The success of Classic FM, the affordable riches of the Proms, Radio 3’s tie-loosening and the vibrant marketing/education/ programming initiatives of my colleagues around the country can all counter the insidious tendency to use the C-word as a jeer word. Such leadership and advocacy can’t be done by the classical music fraternity alone. The broader constituency of intelligent, educated, culturally literate people (OK, you) needs to back classical music, too.”
A New Music Downloading Scheme
A new music download service promises to revolutionize the download model. “Subscribers will be charged £26 a month for a high speed broadband internet connection, similar to the price charged by BT, with the added attraction of being able to share as much music as they want with other subscribers at no extra cost. Because there will be no restrictions on the format in which the traded music is encoded, users will be free to transfer songs to any type of digital music player, including the market leading Apple iPod, or burn them to CD.”
Olympic Comedy
Chicago is home to the granddaddy of sketch comedy troupes – Second City. But Improv Olympics, ecelbrating its 225th anniversary, would like some credit too. “So is I.O. a cliquish training camp with too many mediocre shows or a unique, bonafide, overlooked Chicago cultural institution? Maybe all of the above.”