From an operatic standpoint, Shostakovich’s The Nose is a bit of an odd duck, “an absurdist portrayal of a man whose nose departs from his face, runs around town disguised as a bureaucrat, and makes hash of prerevolution Russia’s strict class distinctions.” Musically, the work is a brutal exercise in control, featuring among other things a ten-part chorale and a double canon. (“Imagine Noel Coward patter songs played at warp speed and thrown into a blender.”) But after decades of relative obscurity, The Nose is starting to see some more performances, and the Kirov Opera has adopted it as something of a cause.
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Still Shocking After All These Years
“Peek into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fictional universe and it is easy to see why so many still take offense. Singer’s characters, nearly all Jews, curse and covet and commit adultery. They impersonate demons or invoke them. They are superstitious, provincial, desirous. Nearly everything forbidden by Jewish law and custom is done by one character or another… Now, with the publication of three encyclopedic volumes of Singer’s short stories by the Library of America, and with lectures and readings honoring the centennial of his birth this year, another opportunity is being offered to take the measure of those transgressions.”
The Deadline Poet Gets Political (And Popular)
Calvin Trillin – the often-political poet who got his start in published verse with a little gem titled “If You Knew What Sununu” – does not harbor any illusions about matching up with the great poets of his or any other era. (In fact, he once penned a two-line poem on the subject: “They’ve named another poet laureate / It’s not me yet.”) But Trillin’s latest collection of doggerel debuted at #7 on the bestseller list, and while the humor of his work may have something to do with it, there’s no doubt that his liberal slant and anger at the Bush administration is feeding sales as well.
Is Broadway Choking On Talentless Celebrity?
Broadway’s obsession with big-name pop culture stars and washed-up blips on the cultural radar is getting out of hand. “Just a quick gaze at today’s theater listings can give a person the distinct sensation of watching a particularly poignant episode of ‘I Love the 90’s.'” Worse, previous experience and actual talent or ability seem to have next to nothing to do with these casting decisions.
The British Blandcasting Corporation?
Peter Aspden is exasperated by the BBC’s culture of high-minded talk and middlebrow action. “It is admirably well-meaning, and there is a striking sense of solidarity about the place, the kind of feeling that found expression following the abrupt departure of its former director-general Greg Dyke in the aftermath of the Hutton inquiry. But there is also… something scarily bland in the air.” Lately, though, the BBC had been fighting back against those who claim the company has been dumbing down its cultural coverage, and while some claim that the timing is awfully convenient, it’s hard to deny that many of those assaulting the BBC have a bit of a class-fed elitist bent.
But Pros Play An Awful Lot of Crappy Music, Too
Chicago’s Steans Institute for Young Artists may not be as famous a professional training ground as Tanglewood, but it has been nurturing young musicians in a semi-professional setting for 15 years. But while the program has come far from its humble origins as a chamber music seminar, Andrew Patner says that the organizers may need to reconsider some of their programming decisions, if they’re truly aiming to educate their participants, rather than simply to bore their audience.
The Sage Of Conventions Past
One name kept popping up in the international coverage of last week’s Democratic National Convention, and it wasn’t John Kerry. The name was H.L. Mencken, the famous journalistic curmudgeon who covered political conventions for nearly a half-century, and whose words describing the process have never been equaled: “There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging… It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming.”
A New Progressive Book Club
“The 75,000-member Conservative Book Club, founded in 1964, is responsible in the past couple of years for a dozen bestsellers. Thanks to the CBC’s success, earlier this year media giants Bertelsmann Inc. and AOL Time Warner launched a right-wing book club of their own, American Compass. Yet despite the popularity of recent books by lefties like Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Tom Frank, there hasn’t been a book club for progressives.” Until now…
Museums’ Who-Knows Problem
“Museums don’t like to call attention to it, but many of the ancient artifacts in their collections are what curators delicately call ‘unprovenanced’ — that is, they don’t know where the pieces came from because they were removed from their original “find-spot” unscientifically, at best, or illegally, at worst. It’s not a new problem.”
Did Axelrod Sell NJ Symphony Fakes?
Five of the 30 rare violins sold by Herbert Axelrod last year to the New Jersey Symphony might not be what he purported them to be, suggests an investigation. “They are old instruments, certainly, dating at least to the 19th century. But, the experts say, it is likely they were crafted by someone other than the famed violin-makers to whom they are attributed. In short, the experts say, they are probably fakes, worth a fraction of their appraised value.”