This week, New York’s Juilliard School will send another several hundred young musicians, dancers, and actors out into the real world, armed with talent, a diploma, and some of the best training available anywhere on Earth. But pedigree doesn’t count for much in the hyper-competitive world of performing arts these days, and the reality is that, even for the cream of the crop, the road from Juilliard to a job can be a long, difficult one.
Tag: 05.21.06
DaVinci’s Real Scandal? The Book Stinks.
If the Catholic Church really wanted to expose the controversy behind The DaVinci Code, says Dominic Papatola, they could leave all the religious babble behind, and just point out what a truly awful read it is. “The book seems to be written at about a sixth-grade readability level. The plot advances in a series of enough improbable ‘a-ha!’ moments to burn through a couple of grosses of light bulbs. And the galloping, thinly strung conspiracy theory makes your typical Kennedy assassination theorist look scholarly by comparison…”
The Best Work Of Fiction In The Past 25 Years?
“Early this year, the New York Times Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.” The results – in some respects quite surprising, in others not at all – provide a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.”
An Architect Revered (If Not Well-Known)
“Although Tadao Ando is not yet a household name in England (a public square in Manchester is his only UK project to date), in his own country, and indeed throughout the ranks of his profession, this former boxer is revered. His studio gives a clue as to why.”
Levine To Return
James Levine “is returning to the podium after an unprecedented four-month hiatus. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director fell onstage in Symphony Hall at the end of a concert in March, sustaining a rotator-cuff injury to his right shoulder that required surgery.” But the conductor will emerge this summer at Tanglewood…
Japanese Music Apart From The World
Japanese traditional music isn’t much of a player in the international Woorld Music scene. “There are no travelling stars of the ancient music of the Imperial Court known as gagaku, no sell-out albums by players of the sighing bamboo flute called the shakuhachi. The music doesn’t lend itself to “fusion”; you couldn’t really imagine the deep meditative twanging of the koto or zither put against a Latin beat.”