Category: today’s top story

“Not typically ones to raise their voices, librarians staged an overnight read-in on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library on Grand Army Plaza to criticize the city’s plan to close 40 branches by month’s end, and to reduce hours and employees at those that remain. The event’s slogan: ‘We Will Not Be Shushed.'”

David Patrick Stearns on Yannick Nézet-Séguin: “Has the Philadelphia Orchestra ever had a fun music director? … Levity has never been a priority in the serious world of classical music. We’re talking about a musical CEO here – and huge responsibilities to deliver world-class Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler. So here’s a conductor who appears on his Facebook page in a swim suit.” (Is he hot?)

The dynamic, diminutive Canadian maestro, now 35 and very much a rising star in both symphonic music and opera, will begin a five-year term as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s music director in September 2012. Says the orchestra’s board chair, “I believe that we have attracted a rising star early in his career, and he will assume the post of music director at about the same age as Ormandy and Muti.”

“If you have been following the news about arts funding, you have reason to be concerned. A vast pool of private, public, and philanthropic capital has gone down the drain in the US, and elsewhere, in the “Great Recession”–with predictable consequences.”

“The gently twisted take on a vast butterfly net is the first of five interlinked giants of Teesside which will lay claim, on completion in the next decade, to being the biggest public artwork in the world.”

“First, Haitians received food and shelter; now the moving image has joined the humanitarian response. All over this rattled capital city, Port-au-Prince, outdoor screens are popping up, as a handful of organizations race to produce programming that entertains and informs the hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in camps without televisions or radios.”

“If you haven’t heard of [the opera], it’s because the composer never got around to finishing it and it wasn’t found in his papers until after his death. … When Wolf Trap started thinking about staging ‘Zaide,’ the question immediately surfaced of how they wanted to end it. There were plenty of options.” This weekend the audience gets to pick one.

“Barbara Kingsolver took the £30,000 prize for The Lacuna, her eagerly awaited first novel since 2000.The American novelist held off heavyweight competition from Hilary Mantel, for Wolf Hall, and Lorrie Moore, for A Gate at the Stairs, to take what is the biggest literary award for women writers.”

“That decline was less than the 6.4 percent drop to $12.8 billion in 2008,” and also less than the 3.6 percent decline in “giving to all categories of charities and nonprofits” in 2009. “Experts had anticipated a much sharper drop last year amid the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

At a special meeting of the Aspen Music Festival and School’s board of trustees on Monday, chairman Rob “LeBuhn was voted out after a year in office and immediately stepped down.” At the same meeting, the festival’s chief executive, Alan Fletcher, who was fired and rehired last fall, “had his contract extended for two years, through September 2012.”