“A Dutch court has sentenced a 27-year-old radical Islamist to life in prison for the November murder of controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh. Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, had made a courtroom confession and had vowed to do the same again if given the chance. The murder in Amsterdam stunned the Netherlands. The court ruled that it was a terrorist act. The judge said the murder had triggered ‘great fear and insecurity’ in society.”
Blog
The Mozart Problem
Next year will be the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, and yes, the orchestras of the world are well aware, and will shortly be inundating you with more Mozart than you can shake a baton at. But during most seasons, Mozart is rarely heard in the concert halls of major orchestras, and increasingly, his work is restricted to specialized festivals. Part of the problem, of course, is that historically informed performance is now the rule, and most symphony orchestras are loath to have half their musicians sit out for a week just so they can play some Mozart, but there’s a larger issue hanging over the dearth of Wolfgang. “Artur Rubinstein’s comment that Mozart is too simple for children and too difficult for adults is relevant here.”
Oue Makes Bayreuth History
Germany’s prestigious Bayreuth Festival has welcomed its first-ever Asian guest conductor, and the result appears to have been a popular success. Conductor Eiji Oue, music director of Japan’s Osaka Philharmonic and late of the Minnesota Orchestra, took to the Bayreuth podium to open the festival, conducting Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde. Oue, always a firebrand on the podium, reportedly drew cheers for his efforts.
OSM Still MIA
The musicians’ strike at l’Orchestra symphonique de Montreal has been relatively quiet, if you go by press accounts (or lack of them), but the sudden absence from the scene of Canada’s most prestigious orchestra is starting to take a toll on the country’s cultural life. This week, the famous Festival de Lanaudière was to serve as a grand stage for the OSM, with soloists Deborah Voight and Ben Heppner along for the ride. Instead, Voight and Heppner sang with a pick-up orchestra. “Last Wednesday, playing Terry Riley’s In C, OSM players and their families and friends marched from Place des Arts with police escort along downtown Montreal streets to Phillips Square. They collected signatures along the way and got enthusiastic honks from passing motorists.”
The Little Avant-Garde That Could
The problem with running an avant garde theatre, of course, is defining success. Are you successful if your product is so cutting edge that audiences stay away in droves? Or if you are so convincing that you bring in the crowds despite the difficult content? And once you’ve been discovered by the public, how do you keep your edge in the face of the encroachment of the mainstream theatre world? If you’re L.A.’s scrappy City Garage, you just keep right on plugging away like you always have, worrying about the art more than the bottom line, and raising the theatrical standard to a level far higher than the average experimental troupe. “Indeed, City Garage’s auteurist single-mindedness, particularly as applied to its original works and adaptations, is unique in Los Angeles theater, perhaps in the country.”
The Old Vic’s Day Of Reckoning
London’s Old Vic is launching an ambitious project to find the 50 most talented young people in the city’s theatre scene, and to give them exactly 24 hours to do something impressive with their moment in the spotlight. “Over the span of a single night and day teams that have never worked together before must write, produce and perform plays. At 10pm the ‘companies’, each consisting of a playwright, a director, a producer and a handful of actors, is put together for the first time. The playwrights have all night to come up with a script; cast and crew have from 7am to rehearse it and learn their lines, before curtain up at 8pm. It’s terrifying for old timers, let alone newcomers. Yet the practice of creating a piece of theatre in the crucible of such a short time is not only invigorating but also immensely instructive.”
Is Dublin’s Abbey Still Relevant?
With Dublin’s historic Abbey Theatre in the throes of a powerful fiscal crisis, Mary Kenney worries that a large percentage of the Irish public may not be interested in saving it. “Although they say, in opinion polls, that that they approve of a national theatre, not enough ordinary people really go there. [BBC soap operas] Coronation Street and EastEnders, along with Irish television soaps such as Fair City, now provide the everyday stories that were once part of the Abbey repertoire. When you go to the Abbey these days, the audience is often composed of visiting Americans and the well-heeled Dublin bourgeoisie. After it is “restructured”, with proper subsidies, I hope that it will connect more to the life of the people.”
Waiting For A Half-Century
Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of 20th century drama, Waiting For Godot, is almost more of a caricature than a touchstone these days, with parodies abounding. Even so, 50 years after its premiere, Godot “has lost none of its power to astonish and to move, but it no longer seems self-consciously experimental or obscure. With unerring economy and surgical precision, the play puts the human animal on stage in all his naked loneliness. Like the absolute masterpiece it is, it seems to speak directly to us, to our lives, to our situation, while at the same time appearing to belong to a distant, perhaps a non-existent, past.”
Probably Shoulda Seen This Coming
“An abridged version of the Broadway hit Spamalot will open in Las Vegas in 2007 at a custom-built theatre. Casino impresario Steve Wynn plans to stage the show at his Nevada resort at a cost of more than $50m. The musical, written by Eric Idle and based on the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, opened on Broadway in March and won three Tonys in June.”
Assault On Payola (Haven’t We Done This Before?)
It was back in the early 1960s that the first court cases concerning payola, the odious practice of a record company paying radio DJs to play an artist’s songs regardless of quality, hit the press, and the practice was effectively stamped out inside of a decade. But in the past few years, creative new forms of payola have been stampeding through the increasingly corporate American radio industry, virtually unchecked. Now, the state attorney general of New York is pursuing the industry anew, and this week, recording giant Sony BMG agreed to pay a $10 million fine and to halt its practice of paying DJs for airplay.