A British TV show called “Faking It” picked a punk rocker out of a pub and spent four weeks teaching him how to conduct a symphony orchestra – the Royal Philharmonic. “His first hurdle was learning to read music: ‘I didn’t do that well at school. So at first I just saw little black dots. The experts said, ‘There’s no right way to conduct but there’s a wrong way.’ I found it incredibly confusing.”
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Business Titan Quits Museum
George David has quit as president of the board of Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum. “He is one of the corporate world’s top executives [CEO of United Technologies], running a business that has thousands of employees, tens of billions of dollars in assets and a global reach of staggering proportions. In short, David is a master of his universe who took a personal interest in a state arts treasure, wanting it to grow in profound ways, to be a major player in the world art arena. He put his money – and his company’s money – behind that vision. But David didn’t feel he had the unanimous support of the Atheneum board he led for the last four years, a leadership position that was seemingly his for as long as he wanted it…”
The Surrealist’s Library – A Record
Surrealist artist Andre Breton’s collection of art – to be sold next year – provides “the most complete history of the evolution of an iconoclastic group which opposed all forms of moral and social convention and replaced them by the ‘values of dreams, instinct, desire and revolt’.” The 400 paintings, 1,500 photographs and 3,500 documents are an invaluable record. The Surrealists “1924 manifesto laid the ground for some of Europe’s most devastating artistic quarrels, often turning on a love-hate relationship with Marxism, including Breton’s falling out with the communist poet Louis Aragon.”
JK Rowling’s Kindness To A Dying Girl
JK Rowling is famously protective of her privacy. But when the mother of a little girl dying of cancer wrote to the author telling Rowling of her daughter’s love of Harry Potter, Rowling contected the girl and struck up a friendship, even revealing details of her next book to the girl before she died.
Rising Water Under La Scala
The controversial renovation of La Scala Opera House has been further complicated by news that water under the theatre has risen 80 centimeters. “The proposed new stage tower will require foundations at least 18 metres deep, so the lowest four metres of the structure will be under water.”
Rowling Tops Income List
JK Rowling was the UK’s highest-earning woman in 2002, earning £48 million “through the phenomenal success of her creation in book sales and the subsequent cinema box office hits.” That’s about six times more than Queen Elizabeth.
When Violins Are Played Only As “Investment Opportunities”
Owners of a 1718 Stradivarius violin have loaned it to the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But only for two-and-a-half weeks. Then it’s back to the vault in which it lives. Why? The instrument is for sale, and it’s good publicity to get it played. But the instruments are so expensive – this one valued at about $3 million – that very few musicians could ever afford to play, let alone own one.
The Theme-Parking Of Our Museums
“So it’s boom time for British art. As cultural projects continue to appropriate sites left derelict by the decline of hard industry, there has never been so much museum space available.” Never so much pressure to mount that blockbuster show. Are our museums turning into entertainment theme parks of little substance?
Mies – Are You Fer or Agin’ Him?
A new retrospective of the work of architect Mies van der Rohe asks a critic to takes sides. How odd. “You can ask whether Mies was a good architect or a bad architect, an influential architect or not. You can ask whether he has been properly understood and whether he is still relevant today. But to ask whether you are for or against him seems strangely irrelevant, a harking back to half-forgotten battles of an earlier generation.”
Dumbing Down Music On TV
Make classical music “relevant”? “Hip”? “Glamorous”? The new Classic FM TV packages classical music into three-minute MTV-style videos, but far from making it attractive, it succeeds in “creating bland ‘easy listening’ versions that are impossible for any serious musician to listen to.”