Playwright Vaclav Havel has stepped down as president of the Czech Republic. So is the country ready for another artist to lead it? Musician Karel Gott, who has topped the Czech charts for much of the last four decades, has been proposed by a group of rock musicians, and he says he’s interested in running for the job.
Blog
Welser-Möst At Work
When the Cleveland Orchestra selected the young phenom Franz Welser-Möst as the man to succeed Christoph von Dohnanyi as music director, some in the orchestral world expressed surprise that the ensemble many consider the best in America would take a chance on a relatively unproven talent. But Welser-Möst is reportedly working out quite well in Cleveland, despite the incredibly heavy workload music directors are expected to take on in this country. “With utter resolve and politeness, Welser-Möst has proved that he sticks to his artistic guns. And he’s delighted to be working with an orchestra that is so open-minded.”
The “Third Rail” Of Art History?
After Lawrence Weschler wrote about David Hockney’s theory about how Old Master painters might have used optical devices as aids in their work, he got an avalanche of protests. “I write about all sorts of things–hell, I write about relations between Jews and Poles, for God’s sake – so I’m used to getting letters. But I’d never found myself on the receiving end of anything like this. It turns out that the question of technical assistance may be the Third Rail of popular art history. Most people, it seems, prefer to envision their artistic heroes as superhuman draftsmen, capable of rendering ravishingly accurate anatomies or landscapes or townscapes through sheer inborn or God-given talent.”
Calgary, From The Ashes
“The Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra’s creditors agreed Wednesday to a repayment plan that will give them half of what they’re owed. It puts the orchestra one step closer to being able to perform again, which they haven’t done since mid-October when they asked the courts for bankruptcy protection… The CPO has developed a restructuring plan that required $1.5 million in new money, and that those they owed money to accepted 50 cents on the dollar. With the creditors unanimous agreement and the city and province kicking in $250,000 each, the orchestra is close to re-opening.”
Calgary – What About The Musicians?
The Calgary Phil hasn’t performed in close to four months. So are there any musicians left to play once the orchestra reopens? Well, yes, but it hasn’t been easy. Some of the Philharmonic’s players have left town, in search of other employment, but many have stuck around, making ends meet by teaching and playing gigs, and hoping that the orchestra that brought them together wasn’t gone forever.
Booknotes – Keeping It Simple
C-Span’s “Booknotes” is a serious place to talk books. Host Brian Lamb has a big following, but the appeal of the show is in its simplicity. “This is not a show done for intellectuals. A lot of people thought it was in the beginning. They started to hear me ask some very basic questions, and they’d say: ‘Oh, my goodness, why is he asking those stupid questions?’ So: Why is he asking those questions? ‘I want to know the answer’.”
Can A Show Be An ‘Enemy Combatant’?
Overseas opposition to the Bush administration’s foreign policy has taken an unusual turn in London, in the form of a wildly popular (and wildly unsubtle) satirical play called The Madness of George Dubya. The show, which is about to move to a new venue to accomodate the demand for tickets, portrays the American president as “a pajama-wearing buffoon cuddling a teddy bear while his crazed military chiefs order nuclear strikes on Iraq.”
A Broken Industry
In the U.S., orchestras are in fiscal trouble. In Canada, it’s a full-blown crisis. Orchestras in Calgary, Winnipeg, and Edmonton are all facing uncertain futures, and Toronto narrowly avoided financial catastrophe last year. Robert Everett-Green finds much irony in the dichotomy between orchestras which continue to perform at an admirably high level, and a system of arts funding so inadequate that it might as well not exist at all. “What needs fixing is the whole system, including the relationship between arts groups in the same community, and the chain of responsibility that governs the individual organizations.”
The Film Of Pi
Fox Pictures has purchased the film rights to author Yann Martel’s Booker award-winning novel, The Life of Pi. The book, which briefly caused a bit of trouble for the author after Martel revealed that he had appropriated the basic concept from a review of a Brazilian novel which he’d read years before, may prove challenging to adapt for the screen, since it is largely metaphorical, and focuses on a young Indian boy stranded at sea with a Bengal tiger.
Classical Figures
The marketers of classical music have increasingly embraced the ‘sex-sells’ notion that the rest of the music industry bowed to long ago. These days, it’s not just a few crossover artists using their looks to sell their non-visual product, but an industry-wide trend which is dividing musicians and fans down the middle. “It feels increasingly desperate,” says one talent booker, but a publicist points out that “this is one of those issues that seems only to trouble people in classical music… You have to play by the rules of pop culture, to go with the visual orientation of the culture right now.”