Category: today’s top story

The magazine, published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild (a fundraising and support organization) and the most widely circulated classical music publication in the US, made the decision following strenuous objections by Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb to negative reviews in recent issues.

“Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc, whose textbooks have been a staple in American schoolhouses for decades” – and which publishes such evergreens as the Curious George series and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – “filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday after agreeing with creditors to eliminate $3.1 billion of debt.”

Turkey is building new museums and throwing a lot of money toward visual art and archaeology. “Turkey’s cultural plans at home are coupled with an unprecedentedly bold campaign to bring back treasures that it believes were stolen, which now sit in Western museums. These plans enjoy political support across the spectrum and the backing of all Turkey’s museum directors. The campaign targets many more objects and museums than the government has so far let on.”

“His Protean career was surely unique, as he sang and recorded more vocal music than any who came before. … More than that, he was an inspiration to the vast number of singers who have followed his example in this field, and made the singing of lieder a common experience, not to forget the audience he created for this kind of music-making.”

“Because we really have reached the point where a standing ovation doesn’t mean a thing. Pretty much every show you attend on Broadway these days ends with people jumping to their feet and beating their flippers together like captive sea lions whose zookeeper has arrived with a bucket of fish. This is true even for doomed stinkers that find the casts taking their curtain calls with the pale, hopeless mien of patients who have just received a terminal diagnosis.”

As the Swiss maestro completes his four-year term as chief conductor, David Patrick Stearns observes that Dutoit’s decades-long relationship with the orchestra, his high standards and his reliable professionalism kept the Philadelphians sounding like one of the world’s great ensembles through the most unstable period in their history.

“[The] politically engaged Mexican novelist and irrepressible bon vivant … stood at the forefront of Latin American letters for more than half a century … In addition to his career as a novelist, Mr. Fuentes led an intellectually restless life as a political provocateur, an essayist, a screenwriter and playwright, an editor, an ambassador and a cultural historian.”

“In the past year 70 music schools and more than 3,000 teachers in the U.S. have signed up for the Carnegie Hall Royal Conservatory Achievement Program, which will deliver the same kind of syllabus and graded testing used by 500,000 Canadians annually. The federal government, under former Con student Stephen Harper, put up $7.5-million to get the Carnegie partnership started.”

Deitmar “Machold was the Stradivarius man. There are still about 600 violins, 60 cellos and 12 violas from the famous workshop in Cremona, Italy in existence today, and Machold has held about half of these instruments in his hands. His reputation was so stellar that he was permitted to prepare the appraisals himself for the two Stradivarius instruments given to the Bremen bank as collateral, and he has also appeared in court as an expert witness.”

Mystery and thriller writers used to produce a book a year – but that’s not enough in the e-book age. “‘It used to be that once a year was a big deal,’ said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. ‘You could saturate the market. But today the culture is a great big hungry maw, and you have to feed it.'”