How do you test out a new opera? (they’re too big and expensive to take many chances on lesser-known composers). New York City Opera staged a showcase of operas in progress, presenting scenes from operas in progress with the hope of generating interest in them. “These were only workshop tryouts, of course, and not ready for full critical assessments. Still, several of the works (I heard 6 out of 10) left strong initial impressions, good and not so good.”
Blog
Rebuilding The Coliseum (Bookstore)
New York’s Coliseum Books wasn’t pretty or comfortable. But it was a great place to find books (and isn’t that sometimes the point?). So Coliseum was lamented when it lost its lease last year and went out of business. Now it’s reopening on 42nd Street, across from the public library. How to compete with the Barnes & Noble stores on every street corner? Well, there’ll be books you probably won’t find at B&N. And a coffee shop (the investors insisted).
Missouri Orchestra Benches Conductor
The Springfield (Missouri) Symphony has pulled its conductor from a concert this week after patrons expressed worries over SARS. “Apo Hsu, who has no symptoms of the disease, was asked to forgo her appearance at Saturday’s concert by the symphony’s board of directors. The board voted to ask principal violist Amy Muchnick to conduct instead after about 30 patrons called the symphony office about Hsu’s lengthy stay in Taiwan. Hsu returned May 10 to the United States after spending a month in Taipei.”
Shake, Rattle And Ruhr
Arts festivals, like flashy new museum buildings, can be tourist attractions for communities wanting to reinvent themselves. The Ruhr region in Germany, headquarters for coal, steel and heavy industry, has a new festival and a star to run it. But how do you get people to come? “It will take a long time to convince people to come to the Ruhr, And they won’t come for the Vienna Philharmonic.” So Gerard Mortier, who transformed the Salzburg Festival with new offerings, has put together a season of “23 productions with 129 performances in 15 spaces, along with additional concerts, a fringe festival and what promises to be an astonishing installation of a Bill Viola video spectacle.”
Doing The Math – Money Questions Don’t Add Up In Miami
Plenty of blame to go around in the collapse of the Florida Philharmonic. There are many questions about the size of the orchestra’s money woes, the way the orchestra revealed its problems, and its strategy for dealing with them. Then there’s the way the orchestra alienated people with money who had offered to help over the years…
Bashing French Dance
There are many reasons to dislike what the French have contributed to dance, writes Robert Gottlieb. There’s Sylvie Guillem, of course, “a dancer with the fatal combination of tremendous ability, a ruthless determination to do it her way and a total lack of sensibility. I hate to think of the number of ballerinas whose classicism has been corrupted by her extravagant ways.” And then there’s Maurice Bejart…
Australia Bumps Up Arts Funding
The Australian government has increased its spending on the arts. “Responding to the 2002 Myer inquiry into the contemporary visual arts and craft sector, the Government promised the industry an extra $19.5 million over the next four years. This is the first new funding the sector has received in more than a decade. It will be phased in gradually, rising from $3 million next financial year to $6 million in 2005-06.”
New York Arts Orgs Warn Of Cuts If City Budget Passes
New York cultural groups detail the cuts they will have to make if the city’s proposed budget goes through with arts funding cuts. Closed galleries at city museums, new admission fees… “The report warns in particular that as many as 1,000 staff members would have to be dismissed under the mayor’s budget plan, adding to the 450 jobs already eliminated in the 2002-3 fiscal year.”
Cannes – Yeah, There Are Movies, But First…
“Just getting here at all proved problematic for the estimated 150,000 attendees, including some 4,000 journalists from 75 countries: a massive nationwide public workers strike eliminated 80% of airline flights and two-thirds of all trains on the very day most people traveled. Once the weary cinematic pilgrims arrived, they were handed a stern warning about SARS from France’s Ministry of Health. Even though most Asian visitors had volunteered for medical checkups before they’d left, they were directed to report any suspicious symptoms, and all festival-goers were told to leave a forwarding address in case of unknown exposure. Terrorism was another threat no one was exactly ignoring.”
Media Deregulation – A Matter of Survival Or A Threat To Diversity?
Local television station autonomy is at the heart of one of the media ownership rules set to be changed soon by the Federal Communications Commission. Media companies say that: ‘costs are going up, audience is going down, competition is increasing. The only way to help is to relax the ownership rules, allowing networks to buy more stations and increase revenue.” Critics say too much media ownership concentrated in too few hands will destroy media diversity, particularly at the local level.