The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been seen as a textbook case of the financial chaos enveloping American symphony orchestras, has somehow managed to balance its budget. “The PSO had projected a $2.5 million to $3 million structural deficit for the 2003-04 season, but expects to avoid it through increased endowment performance, augmented annual fund contributions, reduced musicians’ salaries, increases in ticket revenue and enhancement of shared services… Other positive fiscal factors include fund raising that is $250,000 ahead of this time last year, a new musicians’ contract that includes a 7.8 percent wage cut for the first two years, and a 30 percent increase in new classical subscription sales from last year to date, totaling 1,550 new subscribers.”
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The Best Turner Line-Up In Years?
“The predictable affectations of horror are already being expressed. But this year’s exhibition is one of the best Turner displays I have seen,” writes Adrian Searle. “There is an air of calm and seriousness, almost a terseness about the show – however volatile some of the subject matter and content.”
Based On A True Story…
As if the controversy surrounding the impending move of the Barnes Collection to center city Philadelphia weren’t confusing enough already, a new play by Thomas Gibbons threatens to muddy the waters even more. Permanent Collection is a fictional play, with made-up characters and a central conflict invented in the author’s mind, but it takes place at the Barnes, and uses the conflicts that have occurred there over the past decade as its historical base. “The wiliest trust lawyer could get lost in the baffling dilemmas involved, but Gibbons sees the difficulties as an invitation to compress some of them into a two-hour drama.”
Not Violet’s Finest Hour
“What’s going on with The Violet Hour? Richard Greenberg’s eagerly awaited new play has been in previews a couple of weeks and already there are so many bodies piling up, the producers might as well park a hearse outside the stage door.” Two lead actors and a director have been axed as the troubled production snowballs towards its official opening, and while the company producing Violet insists that things are under control, Michael Riedel isn’t convinced.
Aboriginal Artists Low-balled By Gallery?
A group of central Australian Aboriginal artists who were brought to Melbourne for a month by a gallery, where they “produced an estimated 62 paintings said to be worth about $134,000, have been asked to accept $7000 or less each as payment for their work” by the gallery. When they refused, the artists were asked to sign a statement which reads in part: “We regret telling the media lies and apologise to Alexis and Tony Hesseen for the problems we caused them”.
Satellite Radio On The Rise
After a decidedly slow start, the satellite radio industry seems to be gaining some long-awaited traction. This week, XM Satellite Radio, the larger of the two currently operating networks, will announce that it has passed the key benchmark of a million subscribers. Sirius, XM’s only competitor, has approximately 250,000 subscribers. The significance of the million-listener mark is likely to be felt on Wall Street, where investors are expected to begin taking the industry seriously for the first time.
Everyone Loves A Good Brawl
In America, the debate over whether newspapers have a right to kill negative book reviews in order not to offend readers and authors has been raging in recent weeks. Meanwhile, in the UK, book reviewers regularly take great delight in savaging not only the works of famous authors, but the authors themselves. (Can you imagine an American review comparing a novel to “catching your favourite uncle masturbating in the school yard,” as a British review of Martin Amis’s latest recently did?) The British approach to literary criticism might be exhausting, says Kate Taylor, but it’s exhilirating, too, and vastly preferable to the vague disinterest favored by North American critics.
Campeau Wins Siminovitch
Stage designer Louise Campeau has won Canada’s 2003 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, the richest art prize in the nation. Campeau, who has designed sets for some 14 companies in Montreal, will receive CAN$100,000, 25% of which she must give to a protégé of her choice.
U-Michigan Names Museum Architect
“Brad Cloepfil’s Allied Works Architecture based in Portland, Oregon, has been chosen for the $35 million expansion and renovation of the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor. The project will include a 55,000-square-foot addition to the museum, which is housed in Alumni Memorial Hall, a Beaux-Arts landmark, located in the heart of the main campus. The hall itself will undergo a complete renovation. When everything is complete, the museum will more than double in size from 41,676 square feet to 95,396. Construction will begin when a fund-raising campaign winds down next year.”
DoubleTake Hopes For Take Two
The Boston-based documentary magazine known as DoubleTake ceased publication this summer, less than a year after a big-money benefit concert pumped $1 million into its coffers. A lack of direction combined with an unrealistic business plan seem to be what sunk the publication, and “if DoubleTake returns, the somewhat esoteric magazine, noted for striking photography and pieces about North Dakota farmers and descendants of the US Confederacy living in Brazil, will be reincarnated with more immediacy and mass appeal.”