In 2001 Americans for the Arts learned it was getting a bequest of between $80 million-$120 million. And what will AFA do with the money? “The first installment in January 2003 topped $3 million, and a comparable cheque arrived last month. The board is handling the funds with great caution. Newly established committees for investment and planning decided to put most of the income into an endowment to extend the value of the donation beyond 30 years, with a target of $100 million.”
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Shakespeare In Flesh-And-Blood
We don’t know very much about Shakespeare the man, do we? “What I think is that literary scholars have played down the historical aspect of Shakespeare. They almost feel his biography doesn’t matter, that he’s a genius who lived outside time. He had a house and kids and wrote plays and we don’t need to know anything else.”
In RoadTrip: Of Orchestras And Big-Name Soloists
Violist Sam Bergman and the Minnesota Orchestra play the legendary Musikverein in Vienna: “When the marquee sports the name ‘Joshua Bell,’ you can be sure of a full house, but you can also be sure of an audience that has come exclusively to see Josh play, and you therefore have some work to do to convince them to take an interest in whatever else is on the program.”
Making Lear Work For Christopher Plummer
The Stratford (Canada) Festival production of King Lear is much anticipated on Broadway, where’s it has sold $2 million worth of tickets before opening. But there was one big hurdle in making the show work in New York. She show stars Christopher Plummer, 76, who “is only able to perform the emotionally and physically taxing role of Lear for five shows a week. It’s a real stretch to make revenues match expenses when the whole company is being paid for eight shows a week but only performing five. “It was very clear that Christopher was not in a position to do more than five performances a week. The advantage is that Christopher is at that rare moment when he’s able to do Lear.”
Architects And The Public Imagination
“Denver, like much of the rest of the country and even the world, obviously has become swept up in the swelling enthusiasm for good design, a trend reflected in everything from Target’s sale of objects by name designers to blow-by-blow coverage of the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. Clearly, fueling part of this interest has been the rush in the past couple of decades by art museums to construct signature buildings by established and up-and-coming architects.”
In Praise Of Ashton
Frederick Ashton created the English ballet style. “Probably no other 20th Century choreographer rivals Balanchine for longevity, output and stylistic innovation. Both were born a century ago this year, both died in the 1980s and both boast incomparable legacies, masters of just about every aspect of their fields.”
Is This Who We Are?
A new book paints an unflattering picture of Americans: According to statistics the author has collected, only 48 percent of American adults understand that the earth orbits the sun yearly. A mere 15 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Iraq or Israel on a labeled map, and 11 percent can’t find the United States. Americans consume a ton of ice cream apiece in the course of a lifetime, spend more on fast food than on higher education, discard 20 billion diapers annually, and develop 9 square miles of rural land every day.”
Bostons’ MFA Goes To Vegas
Why is Bostons’ Museum of Fine Arts doing, traveling a show to the casinos of Las Vegas? “What even the critics can’t deny is the appeal of the paintings. So far, the Bellagio’s Monet show has been a smash, drawing 18,000 people in the 10 days after its Jan. 30 opening. At that pace, and with its $15 ticket price, the MFA could earn even more than $1 million – the total figure hinges on attendance – by the time the show closes in September.”
Altogether (Not Quite So) Different
New York’s annual Altogether Different festival has traditionally been a place where the latest young new experiment choreographers could show there work. But its focus has shifted, and the new generation of choreographers is wondering where the “experimental” disappeared.
Playing Around With What Beethoven Wrote
Modern audiences are used to performances that try to get as close as possible to a composer’s intentions. So it will likely be a shock when Leonard Slatkin performs Beethoven in versions as interpreted by Mahler. M”ahler, like many before and after him, simply filled in places where notes were missing. The range of most of the woodwind instruments had increased, too, so Mahler used the added notes to keep the flutes, say, from having to drop an octave for a note or two.”