Author: Matthew Westphal

Fou Ts’ong, China’s First Internationally Known Classical Pianist, Dead Of COVID At 86

Born to a pair of French literature scholars who were later driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution, Fou went to Warsaw to study at age 19 and two years later won a prize in the Chopin Competition. Not long after, he escaped to western Europe and eventually settled in London, where he taught and maintained an international concert career. – BBC

Despite New COVID Outbreak, Sydney Goes Ahead With Indoor Performances

What’s more, at two of the major ones — Rent and The Merry Widow at the Sydney Opera House — masks will not be mandatory. Audiences will be at 75% of capacity, with checkerboard seating and other distancing measures; masks are “strongly recommended.” Rules are similar for the presentations at the Sydney Festival’s main outdoor stage. Most other theatre companies in the city are performing as well, though they’re making the audience mask up. – The Guardian

How Beethoven Changed Music In The Young United States

From an 1805 concert for the gentry of Charleston featuring the first movement of the First Symphony through the flood of German immigrants in the 1840s, the establishment of orchestras in New York and Boston, and the rise of the Romantic cult of the lone genius, Beethoven’s music was what established both the habit of programming concerts focusing on dead composers’ works and the idea of classical music as an ennobling force with moral value. – Smithsonian Magazine

New York Chauvinism? “Groundbreaking” Show at the Whitney Builds on Dartmouth College’s Lead

I didn’t disclose my contrarian reaction to the Whitney Museum’s Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art when it opened last February. But now I feel less compunction about tempering the praise lavished by art critics on this exploration of how U.S. modernists were inspired by Mexican painters. – Lee Rosenbaum

“An Act of Empathy” — a Dvořák Radio Documentary

When PostClassical Ensemble produced an hour-long film about Dvořák and “the American experience of race” last September, we hardly envisioned turning it into a 45-minute public radio special for the holidays. But that’s what happened, thanks to an invitation from Rupert Allman, who produces the nationally distributed radio magazine 1A. – Joseph Horowitz

What It Takes To Revive A Dead Language

The obvious case of a language being brought back to full life is Hebrew, which was used in Jewish religious ceremonies and texts but hadn’t been a full-fledged spoken language for about two millennia when a conscious decision was made to revive it for use in what would become Israel. Yet there was a couple of key conditions present for Hebrew’s success that weren’t there in the case of, for instance, Irish. – JSTOR Daily

Bollywood Depended Even More On Ticket Income Than Hollywood Did. Here’s How India’s Finally Embracing Direct-To-Streaming.

The fallout from the pandemic reduced box office grosses by about 75%, “making it easier for streaming services to land new movies, even with some theaters reopened. … The investments by streaming services in Bollywood content have also led to a surge of creativity. Instead of the usual romantic or action-hero films with all-star casts, more shows and movies are now centered on women, war and other topics.” – The New York Times

The Recipe For A Viral TikTok Dance Hit

“Drawing from a lexicon of hip-hop-inspired moves, … the micro-dances of TikTok are typically front-facing and most animated from the hips up, tailored to the vertical frame of a smartphone screen. Governed by time limits of 15 or 60 seconds, they also tend to stay in one place; you can do them pretty much anywhere. While these TikTok dances might seem purely fun and frivolous, there’s an art to creating and performing them in such a way that gets attention.” – Dance Magazine