Cecil Balmond’s name probably doesn’t ring a bell, even amongst architecture buffs. But Balmond’s career has been spent in the service of the world’s great architects, finding ways to translate the most unlikely designs into real-world buildings that won’t collapse under their own creativity. “As architects push the limits of their formal language, Mr. Balmond’s engineering genius has been crucial to the emergence of a new aesthetic of shifting asymmetrical structures that mock conventional notions of stability. Beyond making their projects buildable, his solutions spur such architects to explore forms they might not have considered before.”
Tag: 11.26.06
Steve Reich: Definitely An Acquired Taste
Composer Steve Reich may be getting star treatment this year (he just turned 70,) but his music took a long time to be accepted in the concert hall. “The 1971 Boston Symphony performance of his ‘Four Organs’ — the first time his music had been played in a major concert venue — was cheered but also loudly booed in Symphony Hall. And when [Michael] Tilson Thomas performed the work in Carnegie Hall two years later, the audience proved even testier, erupting in protest in the middle of the performance.”
Proceed With Caution
A major renovation of Cincinnati’s overly large and technologically challenged Music Hall is long overdue – on this, everyone agrees. But actually mounting such a renovation is a process fraught with peril, all the more so because the building is a National Historic Landmark. “The mission is to create more intimacy between the players and the audience while preserving Music Hall’s legendary sound.”
More Nazi Loot Turns Up In London
A Cranach masterpiece on display at London’s National Gallery was apparently seized by the Nazis and then taken from postwar Germany by an American journalist, according to sources at the gallery. “The discovery that the picture was spoliated was only recently made and the gallery is now trying to identify the pre-war owner of the painting… The fact that the painting has not been claimed may well mean that the entire family was killed during the war.”