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Is London’s Proposed New Concert Hall Merely A Play For Bragging Rights?

The scheme is slated to cost nearly £300 million and is London’s volley in an intercontinental game of high culture one-upmanship, which in recent years has produced Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and Jean Nouvel’s Philharmonie in Paris. This arms race for cultural dominion has, in London however, reached new levels of absurdity with the decision to build the new 2,000 seat concert hall less than 300 metres from an existing 2,000 seat concert hall. – dezeen

‘A Cross Between Birgit Nilsson And Tina Fey’: How A Perfectly Good Mozart Soprano Became The World’s Leading Wagnerian Hero-Diva

Says Alexander Neef, general director of Canadian Opera Company, about Christine Goerke, “People can’t get over the sheer power of the voice — and I don’t mean only the volume. … It’s not only that she hits all the notes and she hits them powerfully. It’s that there’s always an element of storytelling that really allows her to connect with the audience.” – The New York Times

NY’s New Hudson Yards – Architecture As Luxury Branding With A Giant Waste Basket In The Center

Michael Kimmelman: “It gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership, asleep at the wheel through two administrations, and to a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency.” – The New York Times

Working To Diversify The Buncha-White-Guys World Of Improv

“Improv may still skew white, but things are changing. … The following folks are currently working to alter perceptions and expectations about improv. Some are longtime warriors, others are new to the scene. But all point toward a future in which the stage presents a more diverse mix of ages, nationalities, body types, skin tones, gender identities, sexual orientations, and, yes, even political affiliations.” – American Theatre

Nonwhite And Female TV Writers Take An Awful Lot Of Crap In The Workplace: Study

“[They] faced discrimination and harassment from their fellow staff members. They remained in the same lowly jobs as their counterparts were promoted. They watched their pitches get ignored or rejected, only to see the same ideas warmly embraced when another writer pitched them. … Now a new survey, ‘Behind the Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writers Rooms,’ of nearly 300 women, people of color, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and people with disabilities writing for television has captured in numbers the bias they report.” – The New York Times

Afghanistan’s First All-Women Orchestra Is Now Touring Abroad

The ensemble Zohra, named for the ancient Persian goddess of music, was created five years ago for the female students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, itself founded only in 2008. “The music performed is a combination of traditional Afghan music and western classical. For instance, their new arrangement of ‘Greensleeves'” — made for its tour of England — “contains attractive new instrumentation probably not envisaged by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1934.” – BBC

PBS Launches Subscription Streaming Service On Amazon Prime

“The new streamer, [called PBS Living and] costing $2.99 per month after a seven-day free trial, will offer classic PBS series like The French Chef, This Old House and Antiques Roadshow, along with more recent series like No Passport Required and Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. The new channel will offer subscribers hundreds of episodes of PBS series across the food and cooking, home, culture and travel genres, with new content to be added each month.” – The Hollywood Reporter