The US Congress may have declared this the year of the blues, and a new PBS series focuses attention on the music. But “you rarely hear a blues song on the radio, and it’s hard even to find the CDs in stores. Sales of blues records this year dwindled to only 1 percent of the US market, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures. Yet fans and industry insiders are hoping against hope that a change is coming. Can you say ‘blues revival’ one more time?”
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Elia Kazan, 94
Director Elia Kazan’s achievements in theater and cinema “helped define the American experience for more than a generation. For Broadway, his legendary productions included “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Death of a Salesman.” His movie classics included “On the Waterfront” and “East of Eden.”
Classical Crossover: The Fabricated Genre
This week, New Zealand teenager Hayley Westenra became the latest classical singer to muscle her way onto the pop charts with an album of so-called “crossover” tunes. But what is crossover, really? We’re talking about a genre of music that exists mainly to please the musically retarded, a market-driven style that depends on trend research and technological innovation to churn out pap that appeals to the lowest common denominator of music consumers. “Crossover once took place on a peaceful side-road. Now it swirls round a vast Spaghetti Junction. There are no traffic lights, and a shocking number of fatal pile-ups…”
Nagano – The Berkeley Connection
Kent Nagano, writes Joshua Kosman, is one of the top 10-20 conductors in the world. So why is he still conducting the Berkeley Symphony – a community orchestra – after 25 years? “Nagano’s dedication to the BSO has occasionally had a far more concrete impact on his activities. Because of a scheduling conflict with a Berkeley concert, he says, he had to turn down an invitation to make his first appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic – not once, but four times before he finally debuted with the orchestra in 1997.”
Fighting Ashcroft Makes Reading/Libraries Glamorous?
American librarians have been fighting Attorney General John Ashcroft and his attacks on readers’ privacy. But “for book lovers, Ashcroft versus the librarians is some thing else – one of those spectacles that manage, like book bannings in suburban schools or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to glamorize reading and make it seem to be, as it sometimes and in some places actually is, a high-stakes activity. Suddenly, your unprepossessing branch library – a low-slung 60’s building, perhaps, and not in the greatest repair – looms as an epic battleground of ideas.”
The Tower Of London
Norman Foster’s new tower on the London skyline (it looks like a gherkin) demands your attention. It is “the most conspicuous eruption on London’s skyline in a quarter of a century; a single building that is as big as a small town, with 500,000 square feet of space and able to accommodate 4,000 people with ease. Whatever it’s called, this is the tower that ignited London’s current preoccupation with the skyscraper, breaking the 600-feet barrier in the Square Mile for the first time since 1979.”
The Essential Opera? Readers Offer Their Lists
Last month, Tim Page offered a list of 25 opera recordings he felt could give a listener a good overview of the artform. Not surprisingly, (are there any fans more rabid than opera fans?) Page’s readers scrambled to modify his list. “A few recurring themes can be isolated: Neither baroque nor modern opera seems to be especially popular with many operaphiles (although there are listeners who take to these genres more quickly than they do to much of the standard repertory); it was widely believed that Mozart, Verdi and Wagner should have been represented by more than two operas apiece (and Puccini and Richard Strauss by more than one); and, more than a quarter-century after her death, Maria Callas may still be the world’s most popular opera singer.”
Kamin: Koolhaas Could Have Done Better
“Five years ago, when the celebrated Rotterdam architect Rem Koolhaas won a much-hyped design competition for a campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, there was breathless talk about the sexy new building, and how it would devise a new architecture for the 21st Century… Now the future has arrived, complete with a sensuous, 530-foot-long, stainless steel tube that wraps around the elevated tracks and swallows Chicago Transit Authority trains. It’s a wild, often wonderful vision of urban life, a bit like entering an oversize pinball machine. It is, as advertised, full of brilliant concepts. But it is not a brilliant work of architecture.”
Sing Off – Who Needs It?
Luciano Pavarotti comes to Philadelphia offering to help start a singing competition. So far, though, no one’s taken him up on the offer. “Young singers don’t need glaring spotlights. They need greenhouses to keep them incubating until they are sturdy enough vocally to survive the international-opera treadmill, with the bad airplane air, unsympathetic conductors, and high-concept stage directors that go with it. Competitions are more suited to instrumentalists. They aren’t nearly as vulnerable to the kind of permanent damage an overused voice can suffer.”
Clearing The Pipes
Boston’s Symphony Hall is widely regarded to be one of the finest concert halls in the world, both acoustically and architecturally. And this past summer, one of the most distinctive features of the hall, the 1900 Hutchings organ, underwent a historic tuneup. “In February, [organ builder] Foley-Baker removed the innards of the organ, took apart the electro-pneumatic engine that makes the whole thing work and has been analyzing and rebuilding the elegant old machine. It’s the first major reconditioning since ’49, and includes installation of many of the pipes [that a previous restorer] planned to use in the first place.”