Category: today’s top story

Rostropovich was a great cellist, certainly. But one of his biggest legacies will be the 200+ pieces of cello music composed for him. “He was the recipient of five pieces by Britten; two cello concertos by Shostakovich; and Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante. He gave the first performances of works by Penderecki, Dutilleux, Lutoslawski, Schnittke, Messiaen, Bernstein, Auric and Walton and a host of other 20th-century composers.”

The brilliant Russian cellist died at a Moscow clinic after a long fight with cancer. “Reports from Russia said he would be buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery, where his friend, the former President Boris Yeltsin, was laid to rest earlier this week.”

“Visitor numbers to Swedish museums have declined dramatically since the re-introduction of entrance fees in January this year. A survey by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter compared visitor figures for 15 museums in January 2007 with the same month in 2006. This revealed a decrease of nearly 90,000 visitors to 183,000, from 272,300 the previous year–a substantial drop of 33%.”

That the Virginia Tech shootings happened in the same week that the ultra-violent new double feature Grindhouse debuted in movie theaters across the country is an unhappy coincidence, but it does point up our society’s increasingly inexplicable relationship with violence. “Violence, both actual and in the media, [may] just be in our nature, doomed to come out in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways… But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about the context in which [the Virginia Tech shooter] lived, with its endlessly streaming mayhem and ready supply of guns. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about the content and style of violent movies, television and video games.”

In an unusual move for an American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic is adding a new position, principal conductor, to its artistic roster. The person hired to fill the new job would have authority greater than that of a principal guest conductor, but would still be under the music director’s final authority.

PEN American Center’s World Voices Festival of International Literature, which begins today in New York, “brings together people from 45 countries to talk not only about problems directly affecting writers, but also about other issues, from global warming and the international refugee crisis to the war in Iraq and political torture. It is that direct engagement with political topics that perhaps makes the festival — at least in the United States — stand out.”

“There’s hardly anything surprising about the 2007 Pulitzer going last week to David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole. But the award is yet another sign that this isn’t the most welcoming of times for envelope-pushing drama. Broadway is rife with revivals and British imports. And the big regional theaters, established as an alternative to the commercial system, have had a tough time staying true to their mandate. Risk-averse programming that favors the familiar, preferably with a star lead, slick showmanship and a clobbering marketing campaign, isn’t limited to the Great White Way.”

“Even in an era when elementary school students are adept at mousing and teenagers are fiends at text-messaging, some experts say that writing with a pen is still the backbone for teaching people how to read and learn facts.”

Choreographer Merce Cunningham is 88 years old. Not that you’d notice. “The dances he has made this millennium suggest, amazingly, that no choreographer alive is more concerned with continuing to extend his range… Often what’s distinctive occurs at the basic level of dance vocabulary. One of the supreme step-makers of all time, he delights in splicing one known step onto another to come up with something unprecedented.”

“The network, which dominated television in the late 1990s and earlier this decade, averaged only 6.8 million viewers in prime time last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That’s believed to be lowest weekly average that NBC has recorded during a TV season since the advent of Nielsen’s “people meters” 20 years ago and likely ever.”