On a subject about which she is notoriously tight-lipped, she said, “My goodness gracious, do you think that once you plant a beautiful tree and help it grow for so many years that someone else will come along and just chop it down? Will someone take my place? Yes, we will keep going.”
Tag: 06.12.11
Pierre Boulez Is Still An Iconoclast, Even At 86
“Why burn down the opera houses? [Boulez] laughs: that was just an irritated aside in an interview. ‘I did say burn them down, but it would be far too costly. It would take too many Red Guards.’ … But he’s still serious about the abolition of libraries. ‘How good it would be,’ he once wrote, ‘to wake up and find that one had forgotten everything, absolutely everything’.”
How Working In Regional Theater Shaped A Critic’s Views
Charles McNulty: “I went from the Public Theater to the Yale Rep to the McCarter Theatre in a 12-year span that laid the groundwork for my understanding of how the American theater works. … [The people at these companies] understood they were not just adding to the repertory but that they were also feeding souls – their audiences’ and their own.”
Harold Pinter’s Onetime Lover On The Affair That Inspired Betrayal
Joan Bakewell: “The play portrayed many of the events of the affair between us, with an accuracy verging on the literal. At the time when he first sent me the script, I was deeply distressed to have our private affair so glaringly presented on stage. In the years since then, I have come to regard it as a brilliant exposition of loyalty, love and betrayal between people who care for each other.”
How Should The Philadelphia Orchestra Reach A Broader Public? Follow Ormandy’s Example
“It should be remembered that, more than any other music director before or since, Ormandy clearly understood his job description to encompass the entertainment end of the spectrum.”
The Deathless Alicia Alonso
“To her admirers, [she] is the gracious grande dame of Cuban classical ballet. To detractors, she’s a conservative cultural czarina who has clung to power even longer than Fidel Castro.”
BBC Chairman Vows To Save World Service
“The new chairman of the BBC” – Lord Patten of Barnes, formerly Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong – “has signalled he is prepared to axe sports events and a digital television channel – but vowed to fight to save the World Service from spending cuts.”
Salman Rushdie: TV Series Are Replacing Literature And Film
The multiply honored novelist is writing “a sci-fi television series in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories. ‘It’s like the best of both worlds,’ [he said,] ‘You can work in movie style productions, but have proper control’.”
What We Lose When We Lose College Radio Stations
“[In] a world where we can log on and find any song we want, it turns out that many people enjoy letting someone else curate a set list. College radio, free of the demands of profit and playability [made by corporate owners], is a particularly great source for such serendipity.”
Europe’s 19th Century Mercantile And Cultural Hubs: Can They Restore Their Lustre?
“Leipzig and Manchester offered an alternative model of what a great city might be at the height of empire. Neither a centre of government, nor a leafy refuge from dark satanic mills, they cultivated a life of the mind. … Both face progressive oblivion unless they can revive their particular city of the mind.” (And there are signs of hope.)