The struggle of American conductors to be taken seriously in America is well-documented, but what about British-born maestros looking for work at home? Meet Donald Runnicles: orchestras and critics in Europe and North America rave about him, and yet few British orchestras have ever worked under him. A crash course may be in order, however, as Runnicles is widely rumored to be a finalist to succeed Leonard Slatkin at the head of the BBC Symphony.
Blog
What Went Wrong With ‘Sophie’?
Nicholas Maw’s much-hyped new opera based on the Holocaust novel Sophie’s Choice is one of the hottest tickets on the London scene, but critical reaction has been less than stellar. “Sophie’s Choice ultimately… founders on gaping disparities between subject, score and production. It raises issues that take us into territory where music and theatre struggle to cope.”
It’s Not One Thing, It’s Everything
So what exactly is wrong with Nicholas Maw’s adaptation of Sophie’s Choice? What isn’t? “The opera’s novel-like narrative plays badly onstage. None of the three main characters – the refugee Sophie, her charismatic but mentally ill Brooklyn boyfriend Nathan, and the bystanding narrator Stingo – has a strong entrance. Character expositions are antitheatrical, dispersed rather than concentrated. The first two acts don’t end so much as they stop. Scene after scene lacks a context that might infuse the mundane hi-how-are-you moments in the libretto with significance.”
For Whom The Cell Tolls
This week, as conductor Sakari Oramo, in his New York Philharmonic debut, was wowing a Lincoln Center crowd with Nielsen’s 4th Symphony, a cell phone went off in the balcony, breaking the breathless silence that follows the second movement. Such an event is, of course, all too common these days, but Oramo’s reaction was not: he refused to continue the performance until silence had been fully restored. Justin Davidson wishes more conductors were possessed of such temerity.
Get Your Art At A Christmas Discount
And you thought only the malls were crass and commercial enough to blitz you with Christmas sales! As it happens, lots of galleries and art dealers are looking to cash in on the holiday buying spirit as well, and there may be no better time to pick up some smaller pieces for your collection. “Smart art shoppers have come to rely on the annual discounts to stuff stockings or fill out their own collections, and little guilt is expressed over taking home art by the famous or the nearly-famous at garage-sale prices.”
And The Meek Shall Inherit The Record Business
“Once again this year there was much gnashing of teeth throughout the music business about the ongoing ‘demise’ of classical recording. But… while classical Goliaths like BMG, Decca and Philips have cut back on the number of releases, this has had the positive result of halting much wasteful duplication of repertory. The fact remains that 2002 still brought plenty of important and interesting classical releases, many of them from smaller independent companiesthat are now the shining hope of a battered industry.”
Bellesiles Stripped Of Prize
Historian Michael Bellesiles has been vilified by the political right, ostracized by his colleagues, and forced out of his professorship since charges of falsified research in his controversial book on America’s “gun culture” hit the front pages several months back. Now, Columbia University is stripping Bellesiles of the prestigious Bancroft Prize it awarded him when the book was originally published. For the record, Bellesiles continues to stand by his research.
Bellesiles Stripped of Prize
Historian Michael Bellesiles has been vilified by the political right, ostracized by his colleagues, and forced out of his professorship since charges of falsified research in his controversial book on America’s “gun culture” hit the front pages several months back. Now, Columbia University is stripping Bellesiles of the prestigious Bancroft Prize it awarded him when the book was originally published. For the record, Bellesiles continues to stand by his research.
$2 Million, And For What?
A Frank Lloyd Wright lamp sold at auction this week for nearly $2 million after less than a minute of furious bidding. One of the four losing bidders was an anonymous collector who planned to buy the lamp in order to return it to the Illinois home (now a museum) for which it was specifically designed. To some observers of the auction world, the lamp is just one more example of an art treasure being sacrificed on the altar of the free market at the expense of the public interest.
Music Go Boom?
John Adams has been commissioned by the San Francisco Opera to write an opera about the deveopment of the atom bomb. “It involves what I call American mythology. That was what drew me to the `Nixon in China’ story as well. I grew up in the late 1950s and ’60s, the worst part of the cold war, and these images are planted in my consciousness.”