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A “Window Concert” In A Hotel Courtyard Was Vienna’s First Taste Of Opera Since Lockdown

“Deserted by tourists, a hotel in Vienna gave itself a temporary one-night-only makeover, turning itself into an outdoor concert hall. The guest bedrooms, which have stood empty during the coronavirus lockdown, were transformed into opera boxes for an evening, and the hotel courtyard into a stage to create a rare moment of joy in the city of music on Saturday.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

Music, Social Media, Go Dark On Blackout Tuesday

Instagram and Twitter accounts, from top record label to everyday people, were full of black squares posted in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Most of the captions were blank, though some posted #TheShowMustBePaused, black heart emojis or encouraged people to vote Tuesday with seven states and the District of Columbia are hosting the largest slate of presidential primary elections in almost three months. – Washington Post

Crowd-Based Opera Postpones Reopening

Crowds are essential to this moment — and, really, to opera as an art form. Choruses fill the stage; musicians cram into the orchestra pit; thousands of people sit shoulder to shoulder in the theater. The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s largest houses, seats an audience of nearly 4,000. And it would probably have been packed for the season’s opening night on Sept. 21, the premiere of a new “Aida” production. – The New York Times

Arts Organizations Look To Draw Down Their Endowments During Crisis

The Chicago Lyric Opera plans to spend $23 million from its $173 million endowment this year, almost triple what it typically takes. It canceled its season in March, furloughed staff and cut salaries, but is still facing a huge deficit. “This is an unprecedented situation,” said Anthony Freud, the Lyric’s general director. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is drawing down $37 million from its endowment, more than twice what it would normally take. – The New York Times

The Extraordinary Art Of Christo and Jeanne-Claude

What he and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and collaborator, achieved was so different from the work of anyone else, and on such a huge scale—seventy-five hundred saffron-colored nylon “gates,” in Central Park; the Reichstag, in Berlin, and the Pont Neuf, in Paris, transformed by their cloth wrappings into monumental and sensuous sculptures—that it’s hard to believe it was also ephemeral. Each spectacle drew huge crowds for two weeks and then vanished forever, without a trace. – The New Yorker

Can My Online Choir Give Me What My Regular Choir Does?

I’m not yet sure how much my life will change without choir: without the paper cuts and warmups, the imagistic instructions from conductors (bite the apple, smell the rose, blow the birthday candle), the nonsense vowels (for learning) followed by foreign words (German, Italian, French) twisting in my mouth. The pauses, the frustrations. A dynamic raised and lowered. A tempo sped and slowed. That radical yet practical ethics of ensemble. The chorus says to the individual, you are not important. Blend, modify your vowel, sing a little softer, tune. At the same time, you matter. You must know your part, you must place the “t” correctly, you must practice, and listen. – Commonweal

Recreating The Acoustic J.S. Bach Worked In

“As a composer, Bach would have been highly attuned to the effects of a church’s acoustics on the performance of music. He was known, for example, to have preferred composing for the Thomaskirche over Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche because he deemed it superior for choral music. Supported by an NEH grant and state-of-the-art computational methods, an interdisciplinary team led by Boren is digitally reconstructing the soundscape of the eighteenth-century Thomaskirche to determine just how Bach’s music would have sounded to the composer when it was first performed.” – Humanities Magazine

With a country “on the brink” does it matter if your arts venue is shuttered?

I hear from nearly all corners of the arts sector that there is “no going back to normal” — that something fundamental needs to be redesigned in our systems to make them more equitable, healthy, and sustainable. If so, it matters which arts organizations survive the next two years and which go away, and it matters how arts organizations are defining their short-term and long-term crises and goals. – Diane Ragsdale

Why Regional Theatre Matters

The loss of any regional theatre, whether it is Nuffield Southampton announcing it has gone into administration or the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh taking the painful decision to hibernate until next spring, is an immediate tragedy for that local community. But it has consequences beyond the immediate loss of art, including the damage done to the social fabric of that place and the local economy. – The Stage (UK)