The Montreal newspaper Le Devoir reports that Kent Nagano will be named as the Montreal Symphony’s new music director, succeeding Charles Dutoit. The orchestra won’t comment and says it will anounce the choice in March.
Tag: 02.26.04
Celebrating 25 Years Of Nagano At The Helm
Conductor Kent Nagano celebrates 25 years as director of the Berkeley Symphony. “He transformed it from a group that shunned tuxedoes and played in street clothes at unusual locations such as art museums into a sophisticated symphony known for performing challenging modern music. The fare has stretched from the works of Frank Zappa to an improvisational jazz trumpet concerto by Jeff Beal.”
A Music Downloading Fee? Big Music Doesn’t Like It
An idea to solve the music downloading problem? How about music fans paying ‘a small monthly fee – perhaps $5 – to share files with impunity, using whatever software they like. The money could be collected by a central organization and then distributed among those who own the rights to the songs, based on popularity. The idea has worked before. Broadcast radio stations paid a similar flat fee…” But the music industry has rejected the idea out of hand.
A Shakespeare Company By Any Other Name…
A Virginia Shakespeare company had a problem – people couldn’t figure out its name (what IS “Vpstart”, anyway?). So after struggling with it for a while (pity the poor marketing manager), the company has a new handle. “Most people couldn’t spell the old name, much less figure out what it is we do by seeing it. And that’s not helpful when you’re trying to attract a wider, regional audience.”
Bash Those Network Execs (It’s An Election Year!)
The US Congress takes up another round of media bashing today, with more hearings on “indecency” on the airwaves…At the least, the spectacle makes for great theatre.
Science – Unraveling Giorgione’s Mind
A group of nine Giorgione paintings have been examined with new scientific techniques reveal much about how the artist worked. “What has become clear with the infra-red discoveries is that Giorgione was a radical modernist when he drew. Giorgione doodled as he worked out compositions, just like 20th-century artists. But why did Giorgione, ‘the modernist’, paint such free and fanciful images only to delete them or adapt them into more restrained ones?
Of Writers And Politics (When It Mattered)
A new biography of James Farrell harkens back to a time in American history “when an author’s political convictions genuinely mattered. Nowadays, far from changing anybody else’s mind, the typical writer is too apolitical even to think of changing his own.”
Twenty Years Of TV Infotainment
The infomercial is 20 years old this year – what a landmark. “Infomercials were born out of a Reagan administration ruling in the mid-1980s that lifted restrictions on how much commercial time stations could air. As a result, struggling cable networks took hold of the concept and sold large chunks of time to the highest bidder.”
A Gay Broadway
A new wave of gay theatre is hitting Broadway. “We’re not talking the odd little play here and there. No, we’re talking mainstream hits, the hottest tickets on and off Broadway, what American audiences are cheering in a burst of spring fever even as the culture wars gear up for ugly battle in the presidential election next fall. Queer theater is everywhere, from opulent musicals to profound meditations on truth and beauty to outrageously funny comedies.
Art Of The Home Theatre
There are too many faceless movie-plexes out there. So many homeowners are commissioning their own home theatres, and some of them are pretty ambitious. “Theaters are not about slapping nice-looking fabrics on walls. You need to make the environment come alive with the architecture. It is the whole definition of the space, the aisles, the stairs to the mezzanine, the kind of memories of old movie palaces that have become part our architectural vocabulary. That’s what I try to instill in my work, the echo of the grand spaces that were meant to dazzle the senses before the movie began.”