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Librettists Get More Prominence In The New, Evolving Opera Landscape

“Although the status of librettists has waxed and waned over the centuries, it’s time to recognize their importance again, particularly in the creation of contemporary opera. The resurgence of storytelling, along with the heightened media attention accorded premieres, has helped fuel the commissioning of a plethora of new operas in the U.S. in recent years. And the seemingly insatiable appetite of presenters for “celebrity” operas, as well as adaptations of well-known films and books, has put leading librettists like Mark Campbell, Gene Scheer and Royce Vavrek in great demand.”

The LA Philharmonic Is Once Again Training Youth Orchestras To Work Hard And Kick Ass

But is this enough, in a time of political upheaval (consider Venezuela, for instance, home of El Sistema)? “The mold is definitely breaking, but it is anyone’s guess how 100 young musicians playing for maybe 1,000 listeners can change the world. Isn’t it enough that they have changed their lives, and that they can go on to change others’ lives? And that the audience, which consisted mostly of their mentors and artistic movers and shakers, can use the knowledge of this success to change many more lives?”

It’s A Noisy Cacophonous World. Here’s How Eight Top Curators Try To Make Sense Of The World

Dickens’s characters are cardboard cutouts, even in their names: Inspector Bucket, the Brothers Cheeryble, Jerry Cruncher. They are mechanicals. His prose is turgid and, less forgivable, tortured. Here’s his rendition, in “Dombey and Son,” of a sea-captain’s dialect: “It’s an almighty element. There’s wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling.” What a load of bosh.

Stage Actors Must Fall In Love, Instantly, Performance After Performance

After a long rehearsal and a lot of planning, actors know how to substitute themselves for the characters (mostly without creating problems for the actors themselves). They can be “clear about drawing distinctions between performance and life. Ms. Grant believes in ‘really healthy, strong boundaries,’ she said, and as Mr. Hernandez put it,’This is literally my job. I went to school for it. I’m not skeezing on anybody. It is in the text.’ No carnal appetite here.”

A Dying Venice Turns On Tourists

“Around 2,000 people leave each year. If we go on this way, in a few years’ time Venice will only be populated by tourists. This would be a social, anthropological and historical disaster.” Whether irritated by selfie sticks, noisy wheelie suitcases or people snacking on one of the 391 bridges, Venetians’ contempt towards the 28 million visitors who flood the city each year has reached alarming levels.

Rock Musician Alice Cooper Finds A Long-Lost Andy Warhol In A Tube In A Storage Locker

Yes, that headline sounds like word salad, but it’s real: “The work in question is a red Little Electric Chair silkscreen, from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. Never stretched on a frame, it sat in storage alongside touring artefacts including an electric chair that Cooper used in the early 70s as part of his ghoulish stage show.”

When You Teach, But Do Not Love, Jane Austen

It’s because of what Austen left out, and other women (and men) addressed in their own fiction from the time. “As I’ve realized the scope of 19th-century texts that took up the question of transatlantic slavery and the movements to abolish it, I haven’t read Austen the same way. I can appreciate her skill but feel an urgent need to teach and write about these other stories. With Austen as, often, the primary literary lens into her time period, it can be all too easy to forget how deeply invested English culture was not only in curtailing women’s choices, but also in enslaving millions of people.”