Tag: 02.28.06

When Byron Janis Met Georges Sand’s Granddaughter

Aurore was the granddaughter of Georges Sand. She “was brought up by her grandmother until age 11, when Sand died. After her death, she told me that she decided to completely dedicate her life to her grandmother’s memory. ‘Chopin was an ingrate!’ she told me. ‘My grandmother ran the house solely for him, disrupting all our lives, and yet when he left, there was never any communication from him, not even a letter’.”

You Mean They’re Singing Words?

Should operas performed in English still have surtitles projected above the stage? It sounds like a silly question, unless, of course, you’ve ever been to an opera ostensibly sung in English. Now, English National Opera, which translates all its operas into English and once had its director declare that he would “bomb the London Coliseum” if surtitles were introduced, has quietly begun using them. Not everyone is happy, but a few diehard surtitle haters have begun to admit that they could be won over.

The Complicated Legacy of Miles

Over the course of his long career, Miles Davis went from the embodiment of traditional jazz to its antithesis, becoming a psychedelic free-form musician bent on dragging the world along with him. “But Davis was always more than a mere trumpet stylist with an eye for a trend. He was a conceptualist, with a clear vision of how jazz works and how it should relate to the popular pulse. He pulled around him a succession of musicians, arrangers and producers who understood jazz to be a collective process, making him, if nothing else, an organiser of great innovative bands. Indeed, it was not until the 1980s that the trumpet sound and phrasing techniques he had been honing and experimenting with for decades became ubiquitous.”

The Story Behind The Oils

Most art collectors are content merely to own a painting, and perhaps to look at it on a regular basis. But when Mark Archer purchased a portrait of a woman in a red scarf for £2,800 at the London Art Fair two years ago, he found that the painting would not leave him alone. His investigation into the relatively obscure artist and her subject led to an intriguing storyline involving obsessive love, public nudity, and a tragic suicide.

Drunken Guests Attack Art At Milwaukee Museum

The Milwaukee Museum’s beautiful Calatrava home is a popular place for parties. But “a recent martini fete held there turned into an overcrowded, drunken affair. Some unruly guests accosted artworks, which have been taken off display for a checkup. People threw up, passed out, were injured, got into altercations and climbed onto sculptures at Martinifest, a semi- formal event organized by Clear Channel Radio and held at the museum Feb. 11, according to several people who attended or worked at the event.”

Boy Sticks Gum On Museum Painting

At the Detroit Institute of Arts on Friday, “a mischievous 12-year-old boy visiting the museum with a school group took a piece of barely chewed Wrigley’s Extra Polar Ice out of his mouth and stuck it on Helen Frankenthaler’s 1963 abstract painting “The Bay,” damaging one of the most important modern paintings in the museum’s collection and a landmark picture in the artist’s output.”

In Toronto – Body-Watching

An exhibition of plastinated bodies has been a huge hit in Toronto. “Officials announced that a total of 458,726 visitors paid anywhere from $15 to $25 each to attend Body Worlds 2, the controversial exhibition of 200 plastinated body parts and cadavers (including 20 whole bodies), that had its first-ever Canadian premiere at the centre last September.”