Tag: 07.21.19

The Pianist’s Ultimate Nightmare: Onstage, Conductor Begins Different Concerto Than The Soloist Is There To Play

Tianxu An, the Curtis Institute of Music student, just 20, was ready to play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June. When conductor Vasily Petrenko brought in the orchestra for its brief introduction, the sound that came at An was that of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. – Philadelphia Inquirer

What Defines An Ugly Building?

Over time, arguments and judgments about what constitutes ugliness in architecture – whether it be incompleteness, incongruity or incorrectness – have leached out beyond the profession. Staged in courtrooms, parliamentary committees and public inquiries, strident debates about ugly buildings have influenced the development of technology, the letter of the law, church teaching, the context of criticism, the role of the state and even monarchical privilege. – The Guardian

Artists Withdraw From Whitney Biennial And A Revolution Begins

Jerry Saltz: This saga is much bigger than Kanders or the Whitney. All museums are 100 percent awash in toxic philanthropy — that is the nature of the plutocracy in which we live. Kanders is no isolated case; dirty money is in the woodwork of every American museum. In fact, because it’s been so in the spotlight since its successful downtown move in 2015, is so open to change and also poorer than similar institutions, the Whitney is much more structurally fragile than other large museums.  – New York Magazine

Extinction Rebellion Protests Have Disrupted The UK. Is This The Way To Get Action On Climate Change?

The disconcerting thing about such radicalism, at this moment, is that it is the activists—rather than the state or law enforcement—who have the facts on their side. One of Extinction Rebellion’s favored tactics is to quote the first line of the executive summary of the 2018 report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” – The New Yorker

Shakespeare In Canada, Set In India

It’s the first time a Bard on the Beach production has been set in India – and that’s a boon for Sarena Parmar, the woman playing Helena, who grew up one of very, very few kids of color in Kelowna, B.C. But the country has changed, she says. “Bard on the Beach has been making a push for diversity, but even so, this is the first time it’s had such a large South Asian cast. ‘We’re getting so many more South Asians coming to see the show and suddenly they can see themselves in the story in a way that maybe they couldn’t before,’ [Parmar] said.” – CBC

Hugh Southern, NEA Chair During The Culture Wars And Co-Creator Of The TKTS Booth, Has Died At 87

Before running the NEA and, briefly, the Metropolitan Opera, Southern was the first executive director of the Theatre Development Fund. Though Broadway producers resisted the discount TKTS booth at first, they came to see its value later: “In the fiscal year that ended June 30, in which a record 14.7 million people saw Broadway shows, the TKTS booth at all three locations sold more than 1.1 million same-day discounted tickets, about 8 percent of all tickets sold.” – The New York Times

How Three Women Revolutionized The Ways We Think About Sex And Culture

Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead – all influenced by their mentor, Franz Boas – changed the way we think about human relationships. “The anthropologists had a revolutionary new idea, which they called ‘cultural relativity.’ The phrase is a bit misleading, because it implies there is no truth to be found, but Boas and his students didn’t think that. Instead, they argued that all societies face the same basic problems—love and death, work and children, hierarchy and community—but that different societies could find different, and equally valuable, ways of solving them.” (And Mead, especially, had a lot of sex along the way.) – The Atlantic

Britons Are Not Happy With Unstaffed, Self-Service Scanner Libraries

In some locations, local councils – whose library budgets have been slashed for years by the conservative government – are paying for security guards instead of library staff. “‘It’s a folly … it is dishonest to represent this as a library service when taxpayers have paid for a quality service with a librarian,’ said Nick Poole, chief executive of the UK Library Association.” – The Observer (UK)