“After years in which the Tony category for best play had difficulty finding four credible nominees, this season has given us something resembling a crowded competition. No one would call it an open race, but neither would anyone deem it a cakewalk. And that may not even be the biggest shocker.”
Tag: 05.31.12
Getty Launches Online Art History Research Library
“So far, Columbia University, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Institute of the History of Art (INHA) in Paris, the University of Malaga in Spain and Heidelberg University in Germany have contributed. In all cases, the full digital texts of the books can be downloaded free of charge.”
Israeli Orchestra To Break Wagner Taboo
While there have been several attempts (notably by Daniel Barenboim) to break the longstanding unofficial ban on live performances of Wagner’s music within Israel, the orchestras involved were foreign. This performance – part of a daylong symposium sponsored by the Israel Wagner Society (yes, there is one) – will be given by 100 or so Israeli musicians contracted just for this event.
Reopening Of Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden Delayed For Another Year
This new setback “is on the heels of a previously announced one year delay. The refurbishing was originally supposed to be finished by October of next year and now the theater is scheduled to open in the Fall of 2015.” The company, led by conductor Daniel Barenboim and director Jürgen Flimm, is currently housed across town at the Schiller Theater.
UK Government Backs Off Plan To Cap Tax Deductions For Charitable Gifts
“The government has dropped plans to impose a cap on tax relief on philanthropic donations, which arts organisations had warned could lead to them missing out on tens of millions of pounds of private support.”
ABT Considers Moving Into NY City Ballet’s Theater (Part-Time)
“American Ballet Theater tours and performs at New York City Center in the fall. A major part of its season takes place in June and early July at the Metropolitan Opera House across the Lincoln Center Plaza from the Koch Theater, where City Ballet performs at roughly the same time.”
The Joy Of Fact-Checking With Fred, Ginger, Adele, And YouTube
“Here is the best time an editor might ever have fact-checking: picking through a 3,700-word essay on the song-and-dance partnership of Fred and Adele Astaire.”
Mobile Theater Venue Seats Six, Can Go Almost Anywhere
“Designed by London studio Aberrant Architecture, the Tiny Travelling Theatre” – a red metal box with organ-pipe-style skylights and recessed seating along three walls – is “[i]nspired by small one-to-one spaces, such as a confessional booth or a peepshow.”
The New Yorker Gins Up The Old Prescriptivist-vs.-Descriptivist Language Battle (Again)
“Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round” in the bogus usage wars – revived beginning last month in the famously fussy magazine (to much bemusement on the language geek blogs).
‘Empirical Hubris’: Data Study Says Contemporary Writers Aren’t Influenced By Classics
“In ‘Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature,’ an article published in … The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even today’s literary writers have little use for the classics. They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers … And these researchers, being mathematicians, have the numbers to prove it.”