Category: today’s top story

“With a rags-to-riches story and a media presence of perhaps unprecedented proportions, Dudamel, as leader of a major orchestra at a relatively young age, represents everything right classical music is doing today. Or wrong. It depends entirely on what you think the field should be banking on as its future.”

“A police spokesman said works by Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger were reported missing early this morning from the Paris Museum of Modern Art. … A single masked intruder was caught on a CCTV camera taking the paintings away, according to the prosecutor’s office.”

“Mortier earned a salary of $65,000 and ‘severance’ of $335,000. City Opera hired Mortier in February 2007 when he was still helming the Paris Opera. He was expected to take up his position in New York in September 2009,” but he “resigned in November 2008, saying City Opera’s budget cuts … prevented him from fulfilling his vision.”

UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt “said arts and heritage would ultimately benefit by £50m a year each from changes to the share of cash allocated to them. … Mr Hunt also outlined plans to increase philanthropic giving to the arts through a shake-up of gift aid.”

“In the fictional play, Madoff in his prison cell recalls a long-ago, all-night discussion with Wiesel in the author’s study. No such meeting ever took place.” Playwright Deb Margolin said that “the 81-year-old Wiesel wrote a letter to her describing the play as ‘obscene’ and ‘defamatory’ and stating that he would have his lawyer stop the production.”

“With the BP Sea Otter Habitat set to open this week [at the Aquarium in Long Beach], a potential feel-good moment has turned into a public relations landmine,” thanks to the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Many organizations – in SoCal alone, they include LACMA and public television’s KCET – face similar dilemmas, thanks to BP’s corporate largess.

“Berkshire Juvenile Court Judge Judith Locke has sent these adjudicated offenders — found guilty of such adolescent crimes as fighting, drinking, stealing, and destroying property — not to lockup or conventional community service, but to four afternoons a week of acting exercises, rehearsal, and Shakespearean study.”

Many say they plan “to leave their jobs with no new position on the horizon. … For the past two years, they have felt pressured by both passionate artists who want to do their work regardless of the economic situation and conservative board members, many of whose own companies are in trouble. The challenge of appeasing both at the same time has been overwhelming.”

“Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s $63 billion budget for fiscal year 2011, which starts July 1, calls for a 31 percent reduction in financing for arts groups and a 25 percent cut for libraries — steeper than any such measures he has proposed at this stage of the budget cycle in the last eight years. And the City Council will most likely have to draw from a smaller pool of funds to help make up the difference than it has in the past.”

“British tenor John Treleaven, who plays the hero Siegfried, and American soprano Linda Watson, who plays Brünnhilde, said German director Achim Freyer’s avant-garde staging – which features a steeply tilted stage, bulky costumes and oversized masks – interferes with their acting and singing and poses excruciating physical burdens.”