Plans to cut down trees and build 78 houses near a town west of Paris made famous by paintings by Paul Cezanne has amgered many. “While it is an exaggeration to claim, as some locals do, that the low, curving hill on the road to Claude Monet’s Giverny is the Ile de France’s answer to Aix’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, views of the village are as recognisable today from the opposite bank of the Seine as they were when Cézanne visited his childhood friend Emile Zola 120 years ago.”
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London Buildings Projected Live
London’s buildings and monuments are lit up this season with projected images, transforming the architecture into fantasy objects.
Germany’s New Generation Of Writers
“A new generation of writers may have emerged in Germany over the past decade, but this renaissance in story-telling has gone largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world. A growing unwillingness on the part of especially large U.S. publishing houses to wager a bet on translated novels means that many of Germany’s promising young authors remain inaccessible, thus enhancing the impression that this country’s literary masters have kept their postwar focus on history and politics.”
Today’s Libraries: Books Or DVD’s?
Increasingly, libraries are spending more of their budgets on multimedia and less on books. “The good news for movie fans is that their local library looks more and more like a Blockbuster. The ominous news for book fans is the same: As budget-squeezed public libraries rush to buy DVDs for an insatiable public, branches must act more like multimedia centers and less like temples of the printed page.”
Is The Music Album Dead?
“With the recent boom in 99-cent-per-song downloading sites, music fans are cherry-picking their favorite tunes and ignoring full-length albums – much to the dismay of musicians who spend months crafting them. The album’s glory days could be history, with three-minute singles ruling the music world as they did in the 1950s. That shake-up would not only affect the record labels’ bottom line but might also transform the way pop music is created and heard.”
Botstein Hired To Revive Jerusalem Symphony
Early this year, the Jerusalem Symphony briefly stopped paying its musicians, even though they agreed to 20% salary cuts to try to save the orchestra. The orchestra was placed in receivership, its chairman resigned amid accusations of financial mismanagement and going-out-of-business signs went up on the concert hall.” Now American conductor Leon Botstein has been hired to revive the orchestra’s fortunes. “Botstein was hired, with the backing of the Jerusalem Symphony’s musicians and Israeli cultural officials, to try to rescue the forgotten stepchild of Israeli orchestras after it had been all but abandoned by its main backer, the Israel Broadcasting Authority.”
A NC Town And A Difficult Statue
The North Carolina town of Rocky Mount wanted to erect a statue to Martin Luther King as a tribute to the fact that Dr. King gave one of the first versions of his “I have a dream” speech. But the sculpture has been problematic – townspeople objected to the likeness of the statue, the sculptor has been protested, and…
A Big Job In Detroit
Whoever becomes the Detroit Symphony’s next executive director will have a lot of work to do. Not only is the orchestra searching for a new music director, “the DSO has run operating losses of about $3 million the last three years, including a $1.8-million shortfall in 2003, its largest deficit in more than a decade. A $1-million transfer from its endowment two years ago leaves the accumulated deficit at $2.2 million.”
Milan’s Missing Documents
An investigation of missing documents at Milan’s State Archive has proven startling results. “Thousands of pieces were found to have disappeared: parchments from the 11th century; papal bulls; official decrees bearing the signatures of Emperor Charles V, Empress Maria Theresa and Napoleon; autograph manuscripts by such Italian literary giants as Alessandro Manzoni and Gabriele D’Annunzio — a substantial slice of eight centuries of European history, as seen through documents from one of the continent’s wealthiest metropolitan centers from the Middle Ages onward. Some 3,000 items from the State Archives and smaller depositories have been recovered, while 1,000 more are still reported missing, probably smuggled into private collections in Italy or abroad.”
NEA Shakespeare Program Pacifies Critics
New Criterion editors have generally been against public funding of the arts in general and the NEA in particular. But “it is gratifying to report that the National Endowment for the Arts seems finally to have come around to our way of thinking on these issues. Under the leadership of the distinguished poet and critic Dana Gioia, the NEA has said farewell to the ephemeral and the meretricious. One evidence of the agency’s new commitment to quality is Shakespeare in American Communities.”