Placido Domingo has been awarded an honorary music degree from Oxford University. Oxford chancellor Chris Patten said to Domingo, in Latin: “You are the darling of audiences, a champion of music, the Orpheus of the age.”
Blog
Camp: Where You Can Belt It Out
You’ve heard of fantasy baseball camps. Now there’s fantasy Broadway camps. “Now, for folks who’ve imagined belting to the back of the house like Betty Buckley or Nathan Lane, the Broadway Musical Fantasy Camp (BMFC) is here.”
Differently-Abled Movement
The field of disabled dance has grown out of “a combination of forces: the broader movement to improve the rights of the disabled; the growth of physical therapy; and the influence of contact improvisation, which is more accepting of different kinds of bodies and movement.”
Do Computers Slow Us Down?
“Computers are tremendous labor-saving devices. They give us power to accomplish extraordinary amounts of work in extraordinarily short intervals of time. But they also give us the capability to do things like play solitaire. Or send instant messages. Fiddle with fonts. Futz with PowerPoint. Twiddle with images. Reconfigure link rollovers. Large investments in computers and communications seem necessary for rapid, industry-level productivity growth. Still, there is a strong sense that computers are less of an asset to the economy than they might be if we truly knew what they were good for and how to use them.”
The New Italian (American) Film City
In the 1950s in the era of La Dolce Vita, Cinecitta Studios outside of Rome was a center of cinema, home to Federico Fellini. Inevitably, over the years the studio fell into disrepair. Now it’s undergoing a rebirth, led by a wave of American films. “The studio, built in 1937 by Mussolini as a propaganda instrument, is too often seen as a relic, fettered to Fellini and his peers: ‘It should be seen as a current place, full of people who will be in the cinema tomorrow, not decades ago. Now the most important are the Americans.’Many American productions have used the studio recently.”
From Venice To Basel (Oh What A Relief It Is)
The Basel Art Fair is “strategically timed to consolidate the impressions made and deals struck in Venice [at the Biennale]. This year we could not wait to leave the pavilioned heat and enter the temperate climate of Switzerland and the air-conditioned neutrality of Basel’s exhibition halls. It was not only the most searing heat since 1908, nor humidity pushing 90 per cent, nor 40,000 art professionals who for three days were simply pushing, that made this the most disappointing Biennale for many years. There was a strong sense that the exhibition’s format had run its course.”
Sistine Chapel Online
Now you don’t have to travel to Rome to see Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings. The Vatican has put its art online. “Now, at the click of a mouse, they will now be able to zoom up to the recently restored ceiling, under which the painter – who only wanted to be a sculptor – spent endless months, between 1508 and 1512.” The Vatican website gets 50 million visitors a month.
Free At Last – Winthrop’s Collection Is Liberated
Grenville L Winthrop was “arguably the most discriminating and independent-minded of all 20th-century American collectors. Yet his collection of 4,000 paintings, drawings and objects is far less well-known than theirs.” He left his collection to Harvard’s Fogg Museum with instructions the art was not to be loaned. “Then, about five years ago, the director of the Fogg looked again at the fine print in Winthrop’s will. The document stipulated that, if the museum ever lent a work from the bequest, it would be obliged to pay to the Foundlings Hospital in New York City the sum of $100,000 – a fortune in 1937 when the will was drawn up, but not such a big deal in the late 1990s. In a coup so outrageous I smile every time I think about it, the director simply sent a cheque to the happy orphans, and, hey presto, the magic spell had been broken. The museum was free to lend any of the pictures anywhere, any time, and to anyone who asked. Art that had been immured in an ivory tower went global.”
Venice – Just Looking At Art
Many people have worries about contemporary art, and the Venice Biennale can make those worries rear up at you. But “you don’t have to like it all in order to embrace it. You’re allowed to make distinctions and your distinctions are as likely to be right as anyone else’s. Only a certain percentage of what is in fashion now will stand the test of time. In this way, contemporary art is not so very different from the art of the past.”
Lloyd Webber Oratorio – Sincere, But…
An oratorio written by Andrew and Julian Lloyd Webber’s father William in 1948, gets its world premiere. “If sincerity alone were the key to a work’s success, St Francis of Assisi would be a winner, but unfortunately the score falls down on so many crucial issues of drama, variety, pacing and characterisation that it emerged in this belated premiere, given by the Joyful Company of Singers, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and a team of fine soloists conducted by Peter Broadbent, as more of a curiosity than a real find.”