Scottish Opera is looking for a new leader. But who would want to take on such a precarious company, whose recent history is pocked with controversy. “What’s needed is someone with the rare combination of vision and experience to juggle the financial and practical necessities with the artistic skills to successfully fire this esoteric artform. Scottish Opera is there for the taking – and for the making. Inexperience or mediocrity would be disastrous…”
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Miking The Opera (Okay, Calm Down…)
“For at least 50 years, amplification has regularly been used in opera houses for oracles and offstage voices. It has also been used to transmit the sound of the orchestra to the singers, and vice versa, and to circulate the sound of the ongoing performance throughout the backstage area.” But talk about amplification in the opera house and suddenly everyone gets skittish…
Is Modernist Architecture A Mistake?
“The history of modernist architecture is like a highway whose exits are abstract theories about what contemporary architecture should be. Instead of a home for architecture such as it knew when tradition ruled, each exit leads to a dead end. So the architect gets back on the highway to nowhere and heads for the next exit, and the next dead end. The result has been an extreme stylistic instability involving recurring discoveries of new modes of artistic dysfunction. You can’t make a city more beautiful on these terms.”
DVD’s Now Drive The Movie Biz
“The avalanche of money generated by DVDs has transformed Hollywood, swinging profitability from the multiplex ticket window to the Wal-Mart checkout line. Income from the sale and rental of new movies, television series and classic films accounts for as much as 60% of a major studio’s profits, as DVDs have become a consumer electronics phenomenon. Yet even in a business that trumpets every nickel of box-office grosses, a title’s precise DVD profits remain one of the industry’s best-kept — and, increasingly, most divisive — secrets.”
The New Vaudeville Is Off-Off
“There are still plenty of musicals and one-man shows on Broadway, but the classic boulevard comedy – once the backbone of commercial theater – has become scarce. By contrast, Off Off Broadway, home base for the avant-garde of Big Ideas and Serious Intentions, is filled with vaudevillian high jinks and lowbrow satire.”
Does The Met Need A Star System?
The Metropolitan Opera is doing okay, but not as well as it used to. So what would set the buzz just a little bit higher? “Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Met were to set up shop as a star factory along the lines of MGM in the 1930’s, leveraging the reputations of its best talents in its own institutional interest.”
Is Scratching The Paint Of Other People’s Cars Art?
An artist is making an exhibition of pictures of him scratching the paint of cars with a key in Glasgow and London. “They should feel glad that they’ve been involved in the creative process. I pick the cars randomly. got the idea when my sister and brother-in-law’s cars were keyed. Is it jealousy that causes someone to key a car? Hatred? Revenge? There is a strong creative element in the keying of a car, it’s an emotive engagement.”
Will Pills Replace Psychoanalysis?
As we learn more about how the brain works, we are starting to understand how moods and feelings are controlled by brain chemistry. So what happens to pschoanalysis – talk therapy – that has been popular since Freud? “Advances in neurology, and especially in pharmacology, have called such therapy into question. When psychological and emotional disturbances can be traced to faulty brain chemistry and corrected with a pill, the idea that sitting and talking can treat a problem such as clinical depression might seem outdated.”
Davies: Where’s The Promised Support For Classical Music?
Composer Peter Maxwell Davies is using his position as Master of the Queen’s Music to argue loudly for support of classical music. “In his lecture Sir Peter will condemn the fact that the government, despite launching a music manifesto last year which promised greater access to instrumental tuition for schoolchildren, has put no money towards its fulfilment.
Opera North Embarks On Rebuilding
The UK’s Opera North is about to be ousted from its house for a year while the building is upgraded. “The £31.5m, two-phase renovation and building project involves, in the first instance, construction of rehearsal rooms and an overhaul of the auditorium. The second phase will see the 19th-century Assembly Rooms, next to the theatre, converted into a public space that will serve as a recital hall and room for education work.”