“Australia’s biggest city might finally be mastering the art of medium and high-density living with a ‘characteristically Sydney’ style of housing. This is the verdict of the jury for this year’s Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ awards. But sometimes you have to look in unlikely places for this brave new face of Sydney.”
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Minnesota’s Biggest Arts Benefactor Dies
It is not an overstatement to say that without Ken Dayton, Minneapolis would never have gained a national reputation as a city of the arts. “He and his wife, Judy, were key players in a small group of wealthy, socially prominent Minneapolis families who remade the city’s artistic life in the last half of the 20th century. They helped it evolve from a Midwest city with a few robust old civic institutions into a national model of thriving contemporary and traditional culture, renowned for its philanthropic support… [They] contributed more than $100 million to the Minnesota Orchestra, the Walker Art Center and other civic, social and cultural causes.” Ken Dayton died this weekend, one day shy of his 81st birthday.
Madame Mao Goes To The Opera
Jiang Qing led the type of life so dramatically implausible, so full of power and corruption and disgrace and misery, that it could only ever be fully realized on the operatic stage. The wife of Mao Zedong, who was known in China as the White-Boned Demon, was already memorialized in song by John Adams in his opera, Nixon in China, but now, composer Bright Sheng has made her the title character in his latest work, Madame Mao, which premieres this weekend in Santa Fe. Sheng’s opera presents Jiang Qing as a conflicted and multifaceted woman, to the degree that she is actually portrayed by two different singers representing the two distinct stages of her life.
If You Can’t Beat It, Use It
For too long, says Simon Beer, museums have viewed technology as an unfortunate competitor for their high-minded offerings, and computers as the brain-sucking mechanism that was forcing them to ‘dumb down’ their exhibits. But “the misconception that technology simply means computers is giving way to the realisation that using technology creatively can bring the nation’s past to life and communicate with a much wider audience.”
Music The Healer, Music The Benevolent
Even in our post-religious society, music is frequently described with the sort of reverence generally reserved for prayer, says composer James MacMillan. Of course, the ties between religion and music are long and well-documented, but isn’t there a more fundamental reason why we view serious music with such awe? “It is not only theologians who see a wider context for the discussion of music. The English composer and agnostic Michael Tippett several times made the bold claim that there was a connection between music and compassion. This is fascinating since that was precisely the belief of the medieval music guilds of Europe, which venerated Job as the patron saint of music before Saint Cecilia came along.”
The Only Opera That Requires Rocket Scientists
Next year, Australia will stage its first ever performance of the complete operatic cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the southern city of Adelaide. The Ring Cycle is not just a lot of music to perform in a short time period, it is arguably the most massive physical production any opera company could ever attempt to stage. “The size of the backdrops… is so vast and their technical demands so complex that they are being worked on in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Technical expertise has been brought in from… the University of Adelaide and United Utilities Australia, a major water company. They are being designed by the team that constructed the cauldron that launched the 2000 Sydney Olympics.”
Taking On The Blockbuster Culture
“A few decades ago, art lovers visiting an art museum for the first time would invariably ask, ‘Where are the best pictures that you own?’ But over the last 25 years or so, they’ve been trained to ask instead, ‘What exhibitions do you have on view right now?’ Museums have become more and more preoccupied, even obsessed, with their rosters of temporary shows… The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution’s repository for modern and contemporary art, has caught on to this new reality, acknowledged it as a problem, and set out to do something about it.”
Feeding At An Empty Trough in Pittsburgh?
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been mired in financial quicksand for more than a year, is asking a municipal funding agency to nearly double the amount it contributes to the orchestra. The Allegheny Regional Asset District gave the orchestra $725,000 last fiscal year, on a request for $900,000. This year, the PSO says it needs $1.5 million, which will likely be a hard sell at a time when states across the U.S. are strapped for cash themselves.
Hollywood Learns To Interact With Online Critics
“Advance information about upcoming film releases is stampeding online faster than ever — and studios are finally learning to fight back. As the Internet matures and the film industry gets smarter, the two are increasingly engaged in a pas de deux of guerrilla marketing, official leaks, manipulated early reviews, and legal strong-arming.”
Perfect Line, Perfect Movement, and Really Ugly Feet
Dance is all about line, and grace, and the beauty of the human form. But all art comes with a price, and while the dancers swooping and pouncing before us on a stage often appear to be impeccable specimens of the human aesthetic, you might not want to peer too closely at the ravaged soles inside those toe shoes. Says one Minneapolis-based dancer, “I sometimes can’t tell the difference between ballet and Chinese foot-binding. Both cripple you in the name of beauty. Yet it is this divine thing that I have to do.”