The Teatro Regio appointed a new superintendent, William Graziosi, this week, which means Mr. Noseda would have had to reapply to keep his post as music director, the position he has held since 2007. Instead, he took his name out of contention, calling the theater’s recent actions “disappointing and disheartening.”
Blog
Marvel’s Avengers Movies Have Begun Subverting Their Own Ideas About Superheroism
“After kicking things off with stirring origin movies like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger, the series has gradually started to examine the shaky underpinnings of its heroic Avengers, and is now laying the groundwork for their calamitous upending.”
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker: Where Music And Dance Begin And End
“I never thought of music as just the basic energetic impulse that makes you want to dance; it was always like a textbook, something worth studying. If you consider choreography to be an organization of movement in space and time, then it is very instructive to look at scores and understand how composers organize their material. Both are embodiments of the same idea—music does it in a more abstract way and choreography is more concrete.”
A Ballet Danced By Snails Wearing LEDs
“On a Friday night in central London, 176 shelled gastropods ‘dance’ around me … to a stretched-out, 47-minute long looping rendition of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, played at 35 BPM – the tempo of a snail’s heartbeat. The whole thing may sound like a Trent Reznor studio experiment (Nine Inch Snails, if you will), but this is in fact Slow Pixel, an interactive art installation that urges its audience to take life at a snail’s pace.”
My Refreshing (and Challenging) Tea With Glenda Jackson
It was around this time in the interview that all hell broke loose. After sharing that I had made the trip from Los Angeles expressly to see her Lear, I told her that she had helped me to hear a line from the play as if for the first time. When Lear painfully acknowledges a lifetime of neglecting the vulnerable poor (“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!”), it seemed as if Jackson’s political and artistic commitments merged in a rich understanding of the play. “I didn’t write the line,” she roared. “Why do you dismiss Shakespeare?”
Art History Gets The TED-Talks Treatment
“The [Heni Talks] website currently has 25 videos and plans to post new films once every two weeks. Many are presented by high-profile artists and art-world figures such as Damien Hirst, Jeremy Deller and The Art Newspaper‘s new editor, Alison Cole. … The video subjects range from important works such as the Mona Lisa, and the oeuvre of masters such as Cézanne, to art movements like Pop art and Modernism.”
Photographer Laura Aguilar, 58
“[Her] powerful, quietly beautiful photographs explored the lived realities of members of various marginalized groups, including women, lesbians, Latinas, the working class, overweight people, and those with learning disabilities.” (She was especially known for her nude self-portraits taken in desert landscapes.) “Long under-recognized by mainstream institutions, her work had a sudden resurgence in popularity last year thanks to her traveling retrospective and the inclusion of her work in several group exhibitions across the Pacific Standard Time program.”
How Pretty Yende Became The Star Coloratura Soprano She Couldn’t Conceive Of Being
The South African soprano was astounded when her coaches in the young artist program at La Scala told her to study the role of Lucia de Lammermoor. “I could barely sing a high C,” she says now – but also, as she asked her teachers, “Who looks like me and sings this repertoire?” (Kathleen Battle was not a star in 1980s and ’90s South Africa.) Here, she tells – and shows – Anthony Tommasini how she came to master the quintessential coloratura star vehicle.
The Foundation Dedicated To Funding ‘Hard-To-Fund Work’
Mike Scutari profiles the Michael Kelley Foundation for the Arts, endowed by the late sculptor, which works to fill in the gaps left by the mega-gifts-to-mega-institutions that has developed in Los Angeles.
George R.R. Martin Has A New ‘Game Of Thrones’ Book Coming (But It’s Not The One Fans Are Panting For)
“[The author] told fans today that the long-awaited sixth volume in his Game of Thrones fantasy series, The Winds of Winter, would not be published this year – but softened the blow by revealing that his ‘imaginary history’ of the Targaryen family in Westeros would be released on 20 November. Fire and Blood is set 300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire and … will chronicle ‘the Targaryen civil war that nearly ended their dynasty forever’.”