“Unlike some conductors, Mr. Kleiber was equally convincing in concert works and opera. A fabled perfectionist, he demanded long hours of rehearsal as his reputation grew and allowed him to obtain such concessions. But he made all that work pay off in performances that blended exactitude with impassioned spontaneity.”
Blog
Operatic Sex And Violence? Just A Passing Fad
Two opera productions in Berlin trade heavily in gratuitous sex and violence. Okay, so the theatres were full, even if the critical reception was outrage. But this is a fad that will pass. “Indeed, the quest for this kind of spectacle cannot last, if only because scandal is not a renewable resource. Whatever remaining taboos exist in the opera house can be broken only so many times before this approach becomes a parody of itself. That process may already have begun.”
Reconsidering Isaac Bashevis Singer
“The discoveries about Singer inflame persistent arguments about his work. Did his highly accessible, highly sexual, idiosyncratic mix of Eastern European folklore – full of supernatural demons and dybbuks and frenzied primitive emotion – really deserve the Nobel Prize? Did the Swedish Academy slight better Yiddish writers?”
Rare Statue Recovered From Seine
A rare Claudel-Rodin statue was recovered from the bottom of the Seine in Paris after days of searching. “Stolen from Versailles several weeks ago, the statue – valued at £530,000 – was feared lost after those suspected of the robbery were arrested and confessed to throwing it into the Seine. But a police diving team launched a painstaking search of the river in an area where witnesses reported seeing the suspects dispose of the statue.”
In Canada: Muzzle Al-Jazeera, Muzzle Fox?
So Canada is going to begin showing the Al-Jazeera network on TV (though its programming will be censored). “Many people applauded how cable operators must tape and monitor Al Jazeera 24/7 to head off possible offensive material. So, now that the cable industry has yet another application to import Fox News before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), will anyone call for Fox to be similarly muzzled to stop potentially ‘abusive comment’ on the U.S. channel?”
New Woodstock Performing Arts Center
Ground was broken thios week for a new performing arts center on the site of the original Woodstock Music Festival. “When completed in 2006, the $63 million center, christened the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, will be the first permanent structure to be erected on the site. It will feature a 4,800-person indoor seating theater that can hold another 12,000 spectators on the lawn.”
Philly Orchestra Musicians’ Contract: Management
“At stake is the very future of the orchestra. Negotiation rhetoric? No. The fact is, we have until Sept. 19, when our current five-year contract expires, to determine whether our path continues the preeminence of the orchestra or leads to extinction.”
Philly Orchestra Musicians’ Contract: The Players
“In their current proposal, management is demanding a 10 percent reduction in funding for the musicians, even though compensation for the orchestra is already among the lowest of our peers. To achieve this drastic reduction, musicians have been offered a Hobson’s choice: reduce salaries by 10 percent, potentially driving away our great younger players, or reduce our ranks, threatening the lushness that is a hallmark of the Philadelphia Sound. They also propose to slash our pensions by as much as 50 percent, and charaterized as a “waste” their legal obligation to provide pensions to working musicians over age 701/2. These proposals are the equivalent of selling Renoirs to fix a hole in the Art Museum’s roof.”
The Miraculous Cleveland Orchestra
Why did such an amazing orchestra emerge in Cleveland? “From this once notoriously no-hope city has emerged one of the wonders of the world: an orchestra that displays none of the overt – or extrovert – characteristics of its US siblings, an orchestra whose sound – under current music director Franz Welser-Most, pictured – is so balanced, so luminous, so brilliantly pure, unanimous and gleaming that, at its best, it’s almost miraculous.”
Unmasking Chaucer’s Sloppy Scrivener
“A scribe – who until the weekend was known to history only as Adam the scrivener – so infuriated Geoffrey Chaucer with his carelessness that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs. Now alert academic detective work has unmasked the sloppy copyist of the words of the father of English literature as Adam Pinkhurst, son of a small Surrey landowner during the 14th century.”