San Francisco Opera is getting close to naming a successor to general director Pamela Rosenberg. Who might that person be? “Ideally, the search committee will recognize the tremendous strides the company has taken under Rosenberg’s leadership and select a general director who won’t roll back those advances. The task, instead, is to retain the artistic and theatrical excitement of the curtailed Rosenberg era while expanding its appeal to a wider and more varied audience base.”
Blog
The Death Of Good Christmas Music?
What’s happened to Christmas music? “The proliferation of novelty tunes such as Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer suggest that Christmas as a public event has become so thoroughly commercial as to defy attempts to treat it non-ironically. Those who try end up producing songs that sound like advertising jingles.”
Well-Regarded Wellesley Review To Shut
“After 21 years and more than 200 issues, the highly regarded Women’s Review of Books, published at Wellesley College, will suspend publication after the December issue. Editor in chief Amy Hoffman, who took over the review in 2003, cited falling subscriptions and advertising, as well as increasing costs, for the demise of the literary monthly.”
Cleveland’s Culture Crisis
Cleveland arts groups have experienced a significant downturn in business, selling fewer tickets. “Some blame temporary causes, like the continuing bad economy. Other short-term explanations include lingering worries about terrorism and the war in Iraq, and distraction during and disappointment (in some quarters) with the presidential election. Others suggest paradigm shifts to which the performing arts may be hard-pressed to adapt.”
Judges Walk Out On Aussie Lit Prize
Three judges of Australia’s major book award have quit over changes in the powers of the jury. The administrators of the Mile Franklin Literary Award “adopted a charter that appoints the NSW State Librarian, Dagmar Schmidmaier, as permanent head of the jury, reduces the term of the other judges from six to three years, allows Trust to dismiss the judges without explanation, and prevents them from speaking to the media.”
A Limit To “Free” Speech?
The UK has had a number of recent incidents that challenge the idea of free speech. “The crux of the matter is that one person’s attempt to shock, outrage and offend is another’s legitimate form of creative expression. It’s a murky area of discussion, one that is entirely subjective. But what about art at the very margins of popular acceptance; art that appears to almost everyone to serve no other purpose than to be offensive?”
Guggenheim Cancels Major Cezanne Show
The Guggenheim has canceled a major Cezanne show, due to open in Februarybecause it says it was unable to secure loans for some of the work. The show, Cézanne: The Dawn of Modern Art, explores the painter’s impact on artists like Matisse, Picasso and Braque. It is currently on tour in Europe.
Is The Shine Off Simon Rattle?
Simon Rattle has had a storybook career as one of the world’s great conductors. “But lately it’s not all been rosy. In Berlin, there’s one prominent dissenting voice in the shape of prominent music critic Klaus Geitel himself, who declares roundly that Rattle is the weakest musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic he’s ever seen. The recent recordings of the nine Beethoven symphonies left many reviewers puzzled by its odd mix of “period” and mainstream styles, and the Fidelio recording had some curious vocal casting. In the UK, the dissenters are more numerous…”
Iraq’s National Library Struggles To Rebuild
“The daylight burning of the library, which the invading US military did not protect, was one of the first costly failures in the post-war chaos of occupation last year. Now it is slowly being restored. But in a country where recent history remains bitterly disputed, resurrecting the library and national archive has turned into a remarkably sensitive and political operation.”
Books, Not Bytes, Rule
With Google digitizing some of the world’s most important libraries, “are the days of the library as a social organism over? Almost certainly not, for reasons practical, psychological and, ultimately, spiritual. Locating a book online is one thing, reading it is quite another, for there is no aesthetic substitute for the physical object; the computer revolution rolls on inexorably, but the world is reading more paper books than ever. Indeed, so far from destroying libraries, the internet has protected the written word as never before, and rendered knowledge genuinely democratic.”