Three of the world’s great piano companies – Blüthner, Bechstein and Steinway – turn 150 this year. “Since 1853, artists have praised their instruments. Claude Debussy remarked that piano music should only be written for Bechsteins. For Wilhelm Furtwängler, Blüthner was best. ‘Blüthner pianos can really sing, which is the most wonderful thing you can say about a piano.’ Martha Argerich, an Argentinian-born artist, believes a Steinway sometimes plays better than the pianist — ‘a marvellous surprise’. In business terms, the three fared very differently…”
Tag: 06.05.03
If You Play Contemporary Music And No One Comes, Is It Still Good Music?
Birmingham’s Floof! Festival of contemporary music was first rate. But there was no one there to listen. “The trouble with Britain is that it has a showbiz culture, and things are not regarded as worthwhile unless they fill halls. It is important for those involved in contemporary art music to push home the notion that small audiences are acceptable, that new music deserves a protected status, that it should not be judged by how many bums are affixed to seats. This is reasonable. But while it is fine to accept the position that new music can be a minority interest, which ought not be judged according to popularity, it by no means follows that we should be satisfied with that.”
Ode To Liverpool. Yes, Liverpool, Damn it.
Liverpool has been a blighted hulk for a long time. Now it’s been named the European Capital of Culture, and maybe that will help pick up the city and return it to its former glory. “A hundred years ago the city was the gateway to the empire, the port from which nine million emigrants sailed off to the promised lands of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” It was then “Britain’s only really multicultural city which teemed with Lascar seamen from the Indies, the descendants of African and Black American sailors, Jews from the Pale of Settlement, and the largest Chinatown in Europe. It was a city with its back turned against the land, one which barely inhabited the country it was nominally part of.”
Colorado Governor Slashes At Arts Staff
First Colorado Governor Bill Owens is instrumental is slashing the state’s arts budget from $1.9 million to $200,000. Now Owens is telling the arts council that it mustn’t spend the money on itself. “Currently, he said, 82 percent – $165,000 – is allotted to infrastructure. Owens asked that only $40,000 be used.”
Is Pixar The New Disney?
After five consecutive hits—Pixar’s other two movies are the inspired Toy Story 2 and the middling A Bug’s Life—the animation studio must now be considered ‘the most reliable creative force in Hollywood. Perhaps not since Preston Sturges made seven classic comedies in a row between 1940 and 1944 has one name been such a consistent indicator of audience and critical pleasure.’ The ‘next Disney’ comparisons that have long been lavished upon Pixar and its creative head, John Lasseter, have become more emphatic: Now Pixar and Lasseter are compared not just to Disney, but to Disney during its ‘golden age some 60 years ago,’ as the Los Angeles Daily News put it.”
Some Predictable Tonys?
There’s not much suspense about this Sunday’s Tony Awards. “Think ‘Hairspray,’ ‘Take Me Out’ and ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ and you could be more than halfway there. Still, hopes are high for the entertainment portion of the telecast, particularly with Hugh Jackman as host and the decision by CBS to devote three hours of network time to the show, after several years of letting PBS broadcast the first hour. The Tonys may be perennially low-rated but the ceremony attracts those upper-income viewers certain advertisers love.”
70s Stars Are The Stadium-Sellers
“While new artists like Norah Jones, 24, dominate the airwaves and sell millions of albums, the old folks are cleaning up at the box office. Last summer, five of the top 10 grossing tours were artists that came of age in the ’70s, including Billy Joel and Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Neil Diamond and The Eagles. Three others were acts that debuted in the ’60s: Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, and Cher. Creed and The Dave Matthews Band rounded out the top 10.”
Will Fans Outgrow Harry?
Publishers of the new Harry Potter installment are having 8.5 million pcopies printed in the US. But “as the young wizard enters adolescence in the series’ fifth book, will his original fan base follow, now that many of them are teens themselves? That is the question facing Rowling and her U.S. publisher, Scholastic, with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”
Artists Angry Over Plans For Arts School
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a “self- proclaimed champion of the arts,” has hundreds of artists mad at him. He’s proposed expanding his Oakland School for the Arts, but he wants to expand it into a building that already houses artists, and the plan would evict them. “To displace working artists who are serving thousands of kids and adults for a school for the arts that will serve maybe 400 students at most is perverse. It makes no sense.”
The Problem With Jazz Criticism
Jazz critic Stanley Crouch was fired from JazzTimes magazine last month, and he says there’s much wrong with the field of jazz criticism today. “There is such consistency in the jazz press, and its predilections, that it represents a virtual conspiracy?not one that includes clandestine meetings or muttering in code?but a conspiracy of consensus based in modernist European ideas of avant gardism. It?s stapled to concepts that Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg pushed into the art world during the 1940s and 1950s, championing the narrows of Abstract Expressionism as ‘advanced’ because they ignored the body of basic classical skills in the interest of autobiographical methods devised by the painters themselves. But right now, while mouthing those theories, jazz criticism is actually dominated by an adolescent vision of rebellion that arrives from the world of pop music, rock in particular. That is why I was fired last month from JazzTimes.”