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
Blog
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
A Record 39 Christmas Songs Dominated Year End Billboard Charts
Each holiday season, Mariah Carey’s song and other holiday tunes begin to climb the Billboard charts as their popularity resurfaces through streaming, radio play and even digital sales. Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is No. 2 on the Hot 100 chart this week, followed by Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,“ Burl Ives’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” – Toronto Star (AP)
Ex-Ticketmaster CEO To Movie Theatres: Time To Reinvent And Here’s How
“This is the opportune time to review pricing strategies with the goal to both increase attendance and make the grosses larger. We all know that attendance has been static and the revenue growth in the industry in America has been from raising prices. Theaters will need to look at and embrace variable pricing. Lower prices on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and before 4pm on Thursday—ticket prices from $4-$7, might entice new customers to fill otherwise empty seats and change attendance patterns.” – Deadline
Is Substack The New Journalism?
“In its variety, the Substack corpus resembles the blogosphere. It is produced by a mix of career journalists, bloggers, specialists, novelists, hobbyists, dabblers, and white-collar professionals looking to plump up their personal brands. The company has tried to recruit high-profile writers, offering (to a select few) health-care stipends, design help, and money to hire freelance editors. In certain instances, Substack has also paid advances, often in the generous six figures, incentivizing writers to produce work without employing them.” The New Yorker
Designer Pierre Cardin, 98
He clothed the famous — artists, political luminaries, tastemakers and members of the haute bourgeoisie — but he was also a merchant to the masses with an international brand, his name affixed to an outpouring of products, none too exalted or too humble to escape his avid eye. – The New York Times
The (Difficult) Public Art Of 2020
“Public artworks created in 2020 often took up urgent political and social issues, and the very notion of monuments—of which figures were being elevated and how they were rendered—figured in protest movements, opinion pages, and beyond.” – ARTnews
Understanding The Concept Of Electricity Was Difficult At First
“The strangeness of electricity seemed to be that it was at once ‘so moveable and incapable of rest’ and yet also capable of being arrested if deprived of a suitable conductor, for example, by the air.” – Cabinet
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