“Liverpool has been named European Capital of Culture 2008 by UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. The city beat five other hopefuls – Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newcastle-Gateshead and Oxford – to win the coveted prize… The renewal of its waterfront, a World Heritage site, and cultural centres like Tate Liverpool strengthened its credentials. It is also home to the recently opened Film Arts and Creative Centre, FACT, the UK’s only exhibition and performance space dedicated to film, video and digital art.” The award is likely to generate some much-needed tourism dolllars for Liverpool, which is promising to mount a year-long festival of the arts.
Blog
New Jersey Unveils Dazzling Set of Fiddles
The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra is not generally mentioned in the same breath as the Boston Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, or the Cleveland Orchestra. But the Newark-based NJSO is now the proud caretaker of 30 of the world’s finest old Italian string instruments, a collection which would be the envy of any of the world’s greatest orchestras. So how do they sound? “Imagine being thirsty and drinking a glass of water – clean, functional, easy to ingest, it satisfies the basic need but little more. Now imagine being offered also a nice, steaming hot cup of the finest Belgian chocolate. Suddenly there is flavor, there is a sequence of sensations… This is something like the difference between the NJSO’s string sound pre-Strads and now.”
Louisville Inches Closer to Shutdown
The Louisville Orchestra’s board of directors has scheduled a meeting for next Monday, at which it is expected that they will vote to file for bankruptcy, though no one in the organization is specifying whether it would be Chapter 11 or Chapter 7. The orchestra’s management missed its last payroll on May 30, and musicians are still refusing to reopen negotiations on an ongoing contract, insisting that they make too little money to be able to weather any further salary cuts.
Exit Interview: Toeplitz Leaves Pittsburgh
Gideon Toeplitz leaves as manager of the Pittsburgh Symphony. “I made two major mistakes in big chunks. One is something everyone else in the world made, not only the orchestral world. Look at the airlines. We thought the good times would last. And nobody thought the downturn would last as long as it has, and some people are saying it will last eight years. Maybe I pushed too hard, first with myself and therefore with others, to get where I wanted to get. I was ambitious for the Pittsburgh Symphony. We did 15 tours. Maybe 12 would have been enough. Some things I pushed artistically would have come two years later, anyway. So what?”
The Old Milwaukee Shell Game
The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra may be looking for a temporary home away from home after the 22,000-pound ceiling of the onstage shell that the orchestra uses at its downtown concert hall fell during a routine storage move, and bounced off the stage. No one was hurt in the accident, and tech crews are working to determine whether the stage will be usable for the MSO’s scheduled Beethoven Festival this weekend.
Do Women Still Need Their Own Literary Prize?
“The Orange Prize was founded when no female writers made the shortlist for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1991.” It was needed then. But things have improved – currently 15 of 25 best-sellers in the UK were written by women. Is the Orange still necessary?
Madonna Book To Set Publishing Record?
Madonna’s new children’s book is being published simultaneously “around the world on 15 September, translated into 42 languages. It is the first of five children’s morality tales planned by the singer, based on Hebrew texts she is studying from the Kabbalah religion. US publisher Callaway Editions said it would become the ‘widest simultaneous multi-language release in publishing history’.”
Royal Mail: Hands Off Queenie
Britain’s postal service is protesting an artist’s use of a picture of the Queen on stamps. The Queen’s face has been hidden by the addition of a gas mask. “A spokesman for the Royal Mail said: ‘We do take any breach of copyright very seriously especially in relation to the Queen’s image. We produce over three billion of these stamps every year and the images belong to the Royal Mail’.”
American Museums Discover Latin America
“American museums, long accustomed to regarding Latin American art as an appendage of other divisions or to ignoring it altogether, are bolstering their commitment to buying, showing, and studying everything from Mexican colonial portraiture to Chilean Surrealism. Two major institutions, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), have recently appointed their first chief curators for Latin American art. Others have held major Latin American shows. Museums across the country have established community groups aimed at drumming up support and interest for their Latin American programs, and dealers say the institutional push into Latin American art is adding momentum to the market.”
Davidson: Carnegie Move Good For NY Phil
So why is the New York Philharmonic walking away from Lincoln Center? “Because it has spent the last 40 years in a hall widely — but certainly not unanimously — held to be an acoustical failure, one that has undergone more than its share of tweaks and massive renovations. The prospect of fixing up Avery Fisher Hall again, launching yet another capital campaign to fund yet another overhaul with uncertain results, seemed daunting and horribly expensive. What if — after getting and spending enough hundreds of millions of dollars to do the job, after vacating Avery Fisher and scrounging dates at other places for the years of construction, trying to patch together residencies, extended tours and temporary locations — after all that, the new auditorium still appalled?”