Herbert Breslin’s tell-all biography of Luciano Pavarotti has been the talk of the opera world this year for its catty and bitter tone and mind-boggling revelations concerning the superstar tenor. But the book also represents the final public split between Pavarotti and the author, who spent decades managing the singer’s affairs, completely in the thrall of his stunning voice and outsized personality. “As Pavarotti got bigger in every way, Breslin’s adoration shrank. By the time of the Three Tenors, a pop phenomenon engineered not by Breslin but by the impresario Tibor Rudas, Breslin was miserable.”
Tag: 12.12.04
The Broadway Play Is Dead, Long Live The Br… oh, never mind.
So the Broadway play is becoming an endangered species. Is this evolution of the Great White Way into a musical-dominated tourist trap really worth getting all worked up about? “What’s striking is the recent inability of the Broadway drama to stir the passions of anyone except the most dedicated theatergoers. TV, films, books and music all create waves of discussion about the way we live or run our government… When a play does tap into a hot issue these days, it tends not to happen on Broadway.”
Caravaggio Writ Large
A historic exhibition of 18 works by Caravaggio is drawing crowds in Naples, further cementing the realist master’s reputation as one of the greatest painters of all time. “The reason for the success of this magnificent show has less to do with numbers than with the quality of the works and the period that they document: the last four years of Caravaggio’s life, spent peripatetically outside Rome, where he had made a name for himself before he died at 39 of malaria.”
Let Liverpool Be Liverpool Again
A spectacular complex of museums, shops, and apartments known as the Fourth Grace was supposed to be the architectural cornerstone that would take the city of Liverpool out of its post-industrial doldrums and into a brave new future. “But when escalating costs killed the £325 million project off in the summer, the Fourth Grace became an icon for another kind of Liverpool, an inescapable reminder of the constant stream of failed projects and broken promises in the city.” The real tragedy, though, may be that Liverpool is still trying to reinvent itself with expensive new buildings, when it already has all the raw ingredients of a beautiful city waiting to be highlighted.
Studying Australia’s Musical Life (Where’s The Money?)
“Do reviews of the arts always lead to dollars? The music community must be asking itself this, as no fewer than three separate federal studies have been taking place into Australia’s musical life this year.”
US Bans Some Foreign Writers
American publishers are under US government sanctions not to publish works by foreign writers in certain countries. “In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval. The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.”
Rigoletto House For Sale
The house where Verdi wrote Rigoletto is up for sale. “The asking price for the house in Busseto, near Parma, is about $8 million (Cdn). Whoever buys it will probably have to spend $4 million more to renovate it.”
Movie Morals Police: Back To the 1930s
Some groups are protesting the movie “Kinsey,” claiming that the movie glamorizes someone they blame for weakening American morals. “Such organizations don’t really care about “Kinsey” – an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month’s handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis.”