Category: AJBlogs

The future of the company, as it casts around for new leadership, is just another mystery. Meanwhile, to judge from the choreography and performances on display at the season-opening gala, New York City Ballet is in extremely capable hands.

Petra van Nuis & Dennis Luxion, Because We’re Night People (Petra Sings)
Singer van Nuis and pianist Luxion may not be household names outside of Chicago, but their taste and wide range of musicianship have them perennially in demand in the Windy City.

While Congress and President Trump continue to kick the budgetary can down the road, federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities remains temporarily intact, with its future in doubt.

He was one of the great hidden figures in musical history, and he seems to be a bit less invisible every year.

My guess is that Mazzoli’s Met commission was made on the strength of her formidable previous opera, Breaking the Waves. And this new one? It was not more of the same. It’s different. Really different.

For too many arts organizations, their level of self-focus apparently makes understanding that effective community engagement is something substantially different from traditional sales/marketing/fundraising/education approaches nearly impossible.

Simon Rattle recently asked, “Why do our groups of classical musicians not look like London looks, and what can we do about it?” This sounds like a great goal. But what’s harder to imagine is how we’d get there.

Reputedly, the last public words of Caesar Augustus were ‘Behold, I found Rome of clay, and leave her to you of marble.’ Augustus also left us a magnificent, exquisitely carved cameo whose double-narrative all but deifies him.

Even as he reaches the age at which names become harder and harder to recall, Terry finds that memories of long ago remain powerfully specific: pop songs of the 1950s, commercial jingles of the ’60s, candy from a vacation destination — and the surprisingly modernist mid-century design of Howard Johnson’s motel rooms.

The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler insisted that genuinely great music-making could not occur without a fully engaged audience. After watching Mets games at (D.C.) Nationals Stadium and Citi Field, Joe finds that the same seems to be true of baseball.