“Making poetry work as theatre is not without its difficulties, though. Theatre needs oxygenation: movement, energy, argument. It takes brilliance and effort to bring something as dramatically inert as monologue to life. And, of course, it needs to be visual, too.”
Tag: 01.22.10
Women Conductors Still Have Tough Time In UK
“The reasons that conductors’ gender is still an issue for us are twofold: there are still too few female conductors in charge of orchestras (apart from Jane Glover at the Royal Academy of Music, there are no women currently in posts high up the orchestral or operatic hierarchy anywhere in Britain), and the methods and opportunities for training conductors here are pitifully patchy.”
What Ails Jazz In The UK
“As many feared, jazz gigs in pubs have significantly diminished since the 2003 Licensing Act, with its cumbersome and bureaucratic new licence requirements for live performers. The news that the government was finally thinking of modifying it to exempt small venues got an audible sigh of relief.”
London’s Institute Of Contemporary Art Could Close
“Staff members have been told that a financial deficit currently at around £600,000 might rise to £1.2m and if radical steps are not taken the ICA could be closed by May.”
Needed: A Rethink Of Broadway Previews?
“The Broadway preview is traditionally a period of a few weeks before the official opening night, when audiences pay to see performances but critics keep silent, waiting for the show to open before releasing their reviews. Lately, this theater tradition has been bumping up against some 21st-century realities.”
Needed: A Rethink Of American Orchestras
“Clearly, the survival of orchestras involves the reduction of their cost base, and for that to happen, managements across the country need to make their financial situation transparent to their musicians and make them full partners in creating fiscal viability for the enterprise.”
Sundance Festival Vows To Change
“Sundance Film Festival organizers pulled a Domino’s Pizza on Thursday afternoon, saying that they’d failed in some respects over the last few years and vowing to improve.”
John Eliot Gardiner At 66
“It is evident that he likes to be in control – whether it be his own farmyard, his own opera productions or his own CD company, which Isabella, a former recording executive, runs for him. That may explain why he has never held a position with a conventional orchestra or opera company for long. Musicians accustomed to democratic structures are turned off by his exacting standards and a dictatorial style that has bordered on rudeness in the past.”
How Alan Gilbert Is Changing The New York Philharmonic
“It’s one hell of a gamble. Not only is the 42-year-old Gilbert still, in conducting terms, a baby, he is also virtually unknown, having spent eight years in the relative sticks of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. And yet the mission he has been given is to transform the orchestra and return it to the world-class form that it enjoyed under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. No mean feat.”