“What a musician’s stardom means for symphony orchestras is simple: it enables them to achieve their twin goals of making great music and selling tickets. It comes at a price.”
Tag: 01.24.12
Engage Your Audience? What Does That Really Mean In The Arts?
“What does pop culture have that we don’t? Popular culture has the ability to create a rabid fandom. They use their celebrities, their fan likes and dislikes, and their ability to attract an authentic niche following in order to create a continual conversation.”
Andrew Miller’s Pure Wins £30K Costa Book Award
“A vividly told story of life in pre-revolutionary Paris on Tuesday won the 2011 Costa book award in what turned out to be a bitterly fought two-way tussle between fact and fiction. Andrew Miller was given one of the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes – and a £30,000 cheque – at a ceremony in London for his sixth novel, Pure.“
Sergei Polunin Suddenly Quits Royal Ballet
“The young Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, Covent Garden’s most remarkable male discovery for years, has quit the company today in a stunning shock.”
Proposed Virginia Law Would Deny Orchestral Players Unemployment Benefits
“House Bill 1254 would make symphony performers between orchestra seasons ineligible for unemployment between orchestra seasons if they performed during the last season and plan to perform in the upcoming season.”
Cate Blanchett And Andrew Upton Were Not Asked To Leave Sydney Theatre Co. (Whatever The Herald Says)
“The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story that suggested that the theater company’s board of directors was less than satisfied with the couple’s tenure” and decided not to renew their contract as artistic directors. Both Blanchett’s PR people and the STC’s board insist the suggestion is entirely false; the Herald has appended a half-correction.
Horror Movie Auteur John Carpenter On Composing His Own Film Scores
“I composed the score for my first film Dark Star because I was cheap and fast. I talked to a couple of other composers but they all seemed weird. … For me scoring is all improvisational. After the movie is cut, I synch my synthesizer to the cut footage and just start playing.”
After Seven Balanced Budgets, La Scala Expects Deficit
“La Scala general manager Stéphane Lissner’s first goal when he arrived at the renowned opera house in 2005 was to balance the budget, which he did that year and every year since. This year could be different, he warned Tuesday.”
The RSC’s Latest Kate On Taming The Shrew
Actress Lisa Dillon: “[Kate] is as much a victim of her own behaviour as she is of the society she lives in. … Nobody can exist in a patriarchal society or outside one where your behaviour is so rebellious, vulgar, crass: you will always be the outsider unless something changes. … It’s a question of how you break that cycle. In that sense her story has parallels with addiction.”
Entire Ancient Town Discovered On Lakeshore Near Istanbul
“The find is Bathonea, a substantial harbor town dating from the second century B.C. Discovered in 2007 after a drought lowered the lake’s water table, it has been yielding a trove of relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., a period that parallels Istanbul’s founding and its rise as Constantinople.”