“The Berlin Philharmonic (aka the Berliner Philharmoniker, aka the world’s greatest orchestra) will launch its first full season of live webcasts on August 28 with Simon Rattle conducting,” and “the Berliner’s Digital Concert Hall” is “terrific: a high-definition image (Flash H.264 encoding), exceptional sound quality (data transfer rate of up to 320 kbit/s, close to CD quality) and even good camera work (remote controlled).” High quality is pretty much required, however, because the webcasts aren’t free.
Tag: 08.19.09
Edinburgh Ponders How Not To Be Squashed By Olympics
“The London games will start on the same weekend Edinburgh’s festivals season starts and will continue until the end of the second weekend of the Fringe, by which time the EIF will also be up and running. Fringe venue operators say ticket-sale fears are based on recent experience when the festival coincided with the Athens and Beijing Olympics. However, a special taskforce has been set up to work out how Edinburgh can capitalise on the 2012 Olympics….”
At Brooklyn Library, Tintin Violates Community Standards
“[I]f you go to the Brooklyn Public Library seeking a copy of ‘Tintin au Congo,’ Hergé’s second book in a series, prepare to make an appointment and wait days to see the book. ‘It’s not for the public,’ a librarian in the children’s room said this month when a patron asked to see it. The book, published 79 years ago,” has been “held under lock and key” since 2007, after “a patron objected, as others have, to the way Africans are depicted in the book.”
Head Of Prince’s Foundation Responds To Accusations
The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment “is an educational charity which helps communities, developers and designers build places that compare favourably with Britain’s most loved neighbourhoods, towns and cities. We also run training programmes for planners, urban designers and building craftspeople. … I regularly meet other professionals to share ideas and discuss work. We certainly do not meet to review and approve one another’s plans.”
National Geographic To Sell Photos From Its Archive
The National Geographic Society’s archive encompasses “more than 11 million images richly documenting the life of the 20th century, from Uganda to the Mississippi Delta to remote lamaseries near the Mongolian border,” a collection it is opening “to the fine-art market for the first time. National Geographic’s goal is to find private and institutional collectors for the vintage black-and-white prints and later color images.”
Soprano Hildegard Behrens Dies Suddenly At Age 72
Behrens, one of the world’s top Wagnerians in the 1980s and ’90s, was en route to a music festival in Japan when she fell ill and went to a hospital in Tokyo; she died of an apparent aneurysm shortly thereafter.
Franco Zeffirelli, Being Franco Zeffirelli
“Few Italians since Fellini have had such an impact in the United States” as the man his fans and courtiers know as “the maestro” – “from his flower-child-era film of Romeo and Juliet to his opulent productions at the Metropolitan Opera. As he himself is the first to note: ‘I am very much loved’.”
Heathrow Airport Acquires A Writer-In-Residence
Alain de Botton – who “bit our arms off to be involved in the project,” according to a Heathrow spokeswoman – is spending this week in Terminal 5, “seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer [with his] typing appear[ing] in real time on a screen behind him.” His observations will be condensed into a short book to appear next month. The idea seems to be to get the wider world saying something, anything, about the London air hub other than that it’s a crowded, chaotic mess.