“This may be the artistic organization that finally mobilizes the elusive community spirit in dot-com land, the one that channels all that newly acquired wealth into a legacy for the future. The South Bay will have a fully professional company to call its own. And, in an era when anybody with big bucks, a ballerina chum and a serious case of artistic amnesia can found a suburban vanity troupe, the work of Ballet San Jose’s executive director Andrew Bales and his staff deserves a fanfare or two.” – San Francisco Examiner
Tag: 10.16.00
REAL NARRATIVES
Forty German writers gather to talk about a “renaissance of narration” and discover they have a hard time pinning down what “reality” is. – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
BEETHOVEN’S DEATH
How did Beethoven die so young (he was 56)? Why did he go deaf? New analysis of hair trimmed from his head moments after his death may reveal the reasons…or so claims a newly published book released this week. – Discovery
PATERNITY LEAVE
Bass-baritone Bryn Terfel has upset opera fans at Covent Garden, Salzburg and Munich opera houses by canceling his next four months of performances to be with his wife for the birth of their third child, due in January. – BBC Music Magazine
THE OPERA CALENDAR
With opera attendance across America up more than 42 percent since 1982, the opera world is in pretty good shape. Here’s a roundup of opera highlights for this season from around the country. – Sonicnet
OPERATIC DILEMMA
“If other artforms are in a constant scramble to reinvent themselves, opera gives the singular impression of a maiden aunt cast upon a desert island, clutching her trousseau of frocks circa 1910 and a pile of 78s of ‘Great Voices of the Century’ ready to play ‘Desert Island Discs’. It is a source of some anxiety to opera companies, not just locally, but around the world, that their audiences are getting older.” – The Age (Melbourne)
FIGHTING BACK
The all-female string quartet Bond has been banned from the classical music record charts in Britain for sounding too much like pop music. “There’s a classical supervisory committee and they felt it more of a pop record than a classical record.” – BBC