What do we mean by greatness? “The distinction is easier to identify in the performing arts than scientists might credit. Greatness is by definition rare, and fast becoming rarer. Perhaps because so much of the art of interpretation is fakable on film, the magnetism of high performance has been dulled and mediocrity can pass, on first impression, for mastery, while genius is obscured by cheap gesture. Since human nature abhors a vacuum, greatness gets bestowed on whoever catches the public eye.”
Blog
Houston Symphony Musicians To Strike
Musicians of the Houston Symphony are planning a one-day strike Saturday, canceling a performance with guest soloist Midori. “The musicians said they scheduled the strike for Saturday because it’s the day management intends to impose a 14 percent salary cut, raise health-insurance premiums and begin reducing the orchestra by five players through attrition.”
New Music – Reluctance To Take Risks
In the next six months in London there are only eight premieres by British composers. “That’s eight out of roughly 500 works being performed by the country’s symphony orchestras until the end of the season (not including repeat performances on tour). A minuscule proportion – about 1.6% of performed works, if you want to be pedantic about it. Why is new work so thinly represented? Largely, it is because orchestras are reluctant to take risks. Programming new work is expensive. You have to pay the composer…”
Okri: UK Writers Need More Respect…
Why is Britain sliding into “imaginative impotence”? Novelist Ben Okri says its because the country’s writers have little status at home. “Our novelists and poets are unappreciated in their own land, beaten down with defeatism and saddled with an inferiority complex in comparison to their lionised American counterparts, the Nigerian-born author of The Famished Road claimed. ‘It is all very well celebrating the dead, but we are deaf to what living writers are saying, particularly about the war situation we now find ourselves in’.”
Comparing Rubens’ Models
For the first time in a century, in London’s National Gallery Rubens’ “Massacre of the Innocents” will be on a wall beside another Rubens, ‘Samson and Delilah”, dated by scholars as being from the same time, 1609-1610. “The juxtaposition enables visitors to play a ‘spot the same models’ game.” Rubens saved money by reusing models from one painting for the other.
Georges Sand In The Pantheon?
In France there’s a campaign to get writer Georges Sand reburied in the Pantheon on the 200th anniversary of her birth. “If Sand joins this Gallic dead white men’s club – one that nevertheless includes a couple of men of color – she would only be the second woman among the 70-odd people buried there to be admitted ‘on her own merits.’ The first was the physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934) who was ‘panthéonized’ in 1995 with her scientist husband Pierre.”
Why San Francisco Opera Is Hurting
What’s the cause of the financial problems at San Francisco Opera and the resulting change in the way the company does business? Janos Gereben has done a little digging, and offers a list of contributing factors.
An Encyclopedia Where Readers Are Editors
“Last week, the English-language version of Wikipedia, a free multilingual encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers on the Internet, published its 100,000th article. More than 37,000 articles populate the non-English editions. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are written and edited by professionals, Wikipedia is the result of work by thousands of volunteers. Anyone can contribute an article – or edit an existing one – at any time.”
Is Salvatore Licitra The Next Big Thing?
Last year Salvatore Licitra was hailed as the world’s next great tenor when he substituted for Pavarotti at the Metropolitan Opera. Was it all just hype? No, writes Charles Michener – he’s the real thing. “Listening to Mr. Licitra, I thought of something that one of Renée Fleming’s teachers, Arleen Auger, said to the soprano when she was just starting out: ‘Imagine the different registers of your voice as a series of hotel floors, each with its own character.’ Mr. Licitra navigated the ascent to each floor with seamless ease, finding new colors in each room and demonstrating the peculiarly Italian gift of expansiveness that gives a sense of vistas opening up.
Broadway Feeling The Chill
Last week’s grosses for several high-profile Broadway shows weren’t just disappointing, they were abysmal. The extended cold snap blanketing the Northeast isn’t helping what was already shaping up as a dismal season on the Great White Way, and buzz around the industry now has several big-money productions ready to fold in the coming weeks and months.