The best year for theatre? How about 1905, suggests Dominic Dromgoole. “What made the plays of this moment hit the target so often? Historically, these dramatists occupied a unique moment, precariously balanced between traditional structures and modernism. Ibsen began a process of stretching and distorting the sturdy Victorian play, disturbing its traditional scaffold of strong narrative and regular crisis and resolution. Others took it further. The old form wasn’t sufficient for expressing the miasma of little moments they saw and heard around them. They took the four-act form and filled it with the lazy chaos of life and the confused mess of the inner self.”
Tag: 01.05.05
Musicians Protest Bourne’s Tour Plans
Musicians are protesting choreographer Matthew Bourne’s decision to tour his latest ballet outside of London using a 1980s-era recording rather than live musicians. “It smacks of, ‘It’s all right for audiences outside of London to put up with a recording, but London audiences shouldn’t have to accept that’.”
Renzo Piano, Man About Town
Renzo Piano is the architect of the moment in New York, with several high-profile projects on the books. “For an architect who had never designed a building in New York before these projects emerged, Mr. Piano is suddenly spending a lot of time here. So why is an architect celebrated for three decades, starting with his collaboration with Richard Rogers on the Pompidou Center in Paris, finally having his New York moment?”
A Final “Tristan” For The Disks?
EMI’s Abbey Road Studio is hosting “a gargantuan, million-dollar recording of Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ put together as a now-or-never enterprise for the tenor Plácido Domingo but also as a last, heroic stand from a classical CD industry so crushed by economic pressures that many consider it in terminal decline.” It may be the last ever recording of the Wagner epic.
A Music Camp’s Controversial Modernizing Plans
Large-scale changes are underway at Interlochen Music School, where faculty dismissals and program changes have riled some fans of the school. The school’s board chairman says that the changes are essential because “declining enrollment, fewer applicants, higher cancellations and fewer returning campers were threatening the camp’s reputation and even survival. At the same time, the student-staff ratio last summer was two to one. ‘That is not a sustainable ratio’.”
A Website Where Musicians Get The Money
A new UK music website promises to “democratize” how music is distributed. “TuneTribe is offering unsigned artists and acts with existing record deals an 80% share of royalties instead of the traditional 15% offered by majors such as Sony and EMI. Bands can set the price for downloading their own music, with the benchmark set at 79p a track by iTunes.”