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Reviving Music Nearly Killed By Hate

The generation of Jews and others who perished in the Holocaust doubtless contained untold thousands of talented artists, composers, and performers whose skills were tragically lost to history. But conductor James Conlon is determined to bring attention to the music of unjustly ignored “Holocaust-era composers who were banned by the Nazis… Unearthing these lost musical treasures of the Holocaust has become a virtual obsession for Conlon, who begins his first season as music director of the Ravinia Festival on June 23 with a concert of music by Mahler and a virtually forgotten composer who perished at Auschwitz, Viktor Ullmann. Mahler and Ullmann will remain a season-long emphasis.”

A Run On Free Beethoven

BBC listeners downloaded almost 700,000 copies of the first five Beethoven symphonies as Radio3 played nonstop Beethoven last week. The most popular download was the First Symphony. “This trial was all about gauging listeners’ appetite for downloads and the results are astonishing.”

Surviving The Dot-Com Boom And Bust

For many arts groups, the tech bubble of the late 1990s was a boon unlike any other in recent history, a time when businesspeople were rolling in cash and eager to dole it out to needy nonprofits. But in San Francisco, one of the centers of the dot-com boom, the arts were nearly drowned by the concomitant tidal wave of rising real estate prices. “The real estate crunch may have eased when the boom went bust, but now the focus has shifted to battling even more aggressively for financial support, as public and private funding dried up.” The crisis gave new direction to the Bay Area group known as Intersection for the Arts, which has been connecting artists, performers and audiences in an attempt to promote a citywide sense of community ownership of the arts.

Looking Through Vasari At Leonardo (His Greatest Work?)

Is the painting considered Leonardo’s greatest work, on a wall behind another painting by Vasari? A scientist using sophisticated scanners thinks he’s discovered it. “We looked through Vasari’s painted walls with a low-frequency sonogram machine. On the west wall we found nothing really significant. But on the east wall, beneath the Battle of Marciano, we spotted a 16-centimeter cavity. It is very likely that Vasari created it to protect Leonardo’s work. Amazingly, this hollow space is right under Vasari’s hint ‘seek and you shall find.’ “

Vilar Selling Art To Make Bail

As disgraced arts patron Alberto Vilar struggles to free up the $4 million in assets required by the court as part of his $10 million bail agreement, he has apparently decided to allow Christie’s to auction off a part of his personal art collection valued at half a million dollars. “Vilar seemed on the verge of release to home detention and electronic monitoring yesterday when a prosecutor agreed he could be freed even though all the paperwork, including the signatures of four of his friends, was not completed. Judge Kenneth Karas disagreed, though, saying the government would be unable to seize adequate assets if the paperwork were not completed and Vilar fled.”

Still Too Soon, Apparently

A Brooklyn performance artist’s latest project has raised the ire of family members of 9/11 victims, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and at least one New York tabloid. Kerry Skarbakka said that he wanted to get inside the minds of the people who died leaping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center before its final collapse, and his chosen method involved donning a business suit and repeatedly leaping from the roof of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (he wore a harness), while photographers below took pictures of his fall.

Venice’s Big Step Forward

The Venice Biennale seems to have taken a very real turn for the better this year, says Sarah Milroy, not least due to its inclusion of far more than the usual number of female artists. “Customarily, these shows are a real mixed bag, flabby, undisciplined affairs bloated with nepotistic inclusions… But in the two leading curated group exhibitions, there is little trace of the usual laziness. Curators Rosa Martinez (at the Arsenale) and Maria de Corral (at the Italian pavilion) have pulled together large shows that feel carefully shaped and are filled with interesting newcomers from around the world to a degree that made the show feel truly global for the first time in my 20 years of attending.”

House Strikes Library Access From Patriot Act

The U.S. House of Representatives has blocked a controversial provision of the infamous Patriot Act, saying that it impinges on the privacy rights of individuals. The provision allows federal investigators access to library and bookstore records in order to track the reading habits of Americans suspected of wrongdoing. The American Civil Liberties Union is celebrating the 238-to-187 vote striking down the provision. President Bush is most decidedly not.

Power To The People? Maybe…

Most politicians are not what you’d call on the cutting edge of new technology, and in the past few years, that has meant that most Congressional attempts to deal with the controversies surrounding new media, fair use, and copyright law have wound up being criticized as anti-consumer. The main problem seems to be that Congress doesn’t really understand the issues involved. But there are exceptions, and Congressman Rick Boucher is Exhibit A. “While other lawmakers have long-standing relationships with the entertainment industry, whose chief concern is piracy, Boucher sees his pro-technology policies as a way to further education, communication and job creation. Boucher, a Democrat representing the rural 9th District of Virginia, has introduced a bill to restore some of the fair-use rights taken away by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”