Ben Heppner is back at The Met, after more than a year of recuperation from health problems that stole his famous voice. Heppner looks great (he’s lost 60 pounds,) feels better, and this week at New York’s famous opera house he gave “a performance greeted by roars of approval from the Met audience and applause from James Levine himself, who put down his baton at one point to join in the ovation.”
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Tale Of Two Opera Companies – With English National Opera The Loser
While London’s Royal Opera House seems to have steadied itself, The English National Opera is going in the other direction. Norman Lebrecht reports that dismay greeted ENO’s choice of a new director last week. “The most dispiriting aspect of his appointment is its wilful myopia. Nothing about him inspires faith that Sean Doran will do better than any of the bathroom warblers who are lining up to try for an ENO role in Channel Four’s gimmicky Operatunity contest. The idiocy of promoting an untested candidate from a provincial Australian ensemble was amply demonstrated by the fate of Ross Stretton at the ROH.”
Who Knows Who Listens?
With all the money in the commercial world hanging on the results, TV ratings folks are constantly reinventing the way they measure ratings, and updating the demographics numbers for various networks, stations, and individual shows. And yet, radio, which relies at least as much on advertising revenue as television, has a laughably ineffective method of measuring audience share and ratings. The Arbitron company, which collects radio listenership data, “has long been under siege from its clients — radio stations — for this extraordinarily funky system, which is often blamed for wild spikes up and down in a station’s ratings.”
Protesting Poets – Tradition or Knee-Jerk Reaction?
“The belief that poets are naturally rebellious and ‘progressive’ is a fairly recent one. It is equally naive to think that poetic talent confers on its bearer some special grasp of political wisdom. Just in the past hundred years, renowned poets have supported some very bad causes, including communism and fascism. Today, the literary community is overwhelmingly left of center. Is this groundswell of antiwar sentiment among poets driven by well-considered opposition to the war, or is it a knee-jerk reaction?”
Books Based On Video Games?
Better believe it. Games are big business. “Video game sales surpassed movie sales last year, with a staggering $9.4 billion take. Mario, the plucky plumber and star of an 18-year-old series of games, has brought in twice as much revenue as all five Star Wars films combined. The Sims, a digital family whom players manipulate through every stage of life, has sold nearly 20 million units. So it’s no surprise that book publishers are turning to video game novels. Yes, novels.”
Hamilton Gets Tanenbaum Collection
“Real-estate and steel magnate Joey Tanenbaum and his wife Toby have announced an immense donation of 211 European 19th-century works to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, a gift that will make the Southern Ontario city a destination for scholars of the period.” The collection is valued at as much as CAN$90 million, and includes works by Gustave Doré, Jean Léon Gérôme, and Eugene Carrière.
Hot Pictures – Photography makes Its Move
Photography is not only what Richard Woodward of the New York Times last year called the ‘New New Thing in the art market,’ but it is also, says Peter Galassi, chief photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, ‘the medium of the moment.’ Despite a slowing economy, auctions continue to see record prices for classic blue-chip images.”
Music and Race In Annapolis
The Annapolis (Maryland) City Council is considering a resolution which would chastise the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra for its dismissal last fall of music director Leslie Dunner. The firing made waves among musicians in the ASO, and the orchestra management never made public the reason behind it, leading to no small amount of speculation in the community. The issue that bothers the city council is that Dunner is black, and while no one is overtly crying racism, a number of councilors are hinting at it, much to the ASO’s dismay.
Yahoo Cleared In Nazi Memorabilia Suit
“In what might end a three-year legal fight, a Paris court Tuesday threw out accusations by French human rights activists who said Yahoo should be held legally responsible for auctions that were once held on its website of Nazi paraphernalia. The court ruled that Yahoo and its former chief executive, Tim Koogle, never sought to ‘justify war crimes and crimes against humanity’ as they were accused of doing by human rights activists, including Holocaust survivors and their families.” The suit was a complicated one, since France does not allow the display or sale of racist material. At one point, a judge had ordered Yahoo to block French users from viewing or participating in auctions of Nazi material.
Digital Music Gets A Bar Code
It’s so basic, you wonder why no one thought of it earlier. The recording industry has unveiled a system it says will make it easier for artists and record companies to be compensated for digital music purchased online. The system is called GRid (Global Release Identifier,) and it works much like a UPC code attached to each song, allowing the seller to track songs sold. All sides seem to be guardedly optimistic about the system, although privacy advocates worry that the GRid could be used to pursue consumers who buy a tagged song and then allow it to be traded on a song-swapping site.