A report says that free admission to British museums has resulted in hordes of new visitors, but that the policy had failed to attract lower-income visitors. “Its figures show the Natural History Museum in London attracted 72% more visitors last year compared with 2001, the Science Museum had 101.4% more visitors and the Victoria & Albert Museum had 111% more. However, numbers visiting the British Museum fell 4.14% last year.”
Tag: 03.02.03
Dali Sprung From NY Jail
A Salvador Dali drawing that hung in New York’s Riker’s Island jail in the presence of round-the-clock guards, was stolen this weekend. “The audacious thief was apparently not only brazen enough to confiscate Dali’s sketchy rendering of Christ on the cross from a locked display case in the lobby of the men’s jail, but he or she also managed to leave behind a schlocky, B-rate copy that at least three correction officers were puzzled to find upon reporting to work yesterday morning.”
Denver – Where Is The Theatre Of Protest?
Though ten Denver theatres are participating in the Lysistrata Project, “there is no theater of protest here, no theater of war, not even one token production of the firehouse eulogy “The Guys,” which has brought the tragedy home to cities outside New York in a way no other medium can. Denver is simply not a reactive theater community, which means it is failing in a fundamental and historic civic responsibility: to bring comfort, perspective and understanding not only about our past but also the world we walk out into once a play ends.”
Lost Beethoven Concerto Is Performed
A lost Beethoven oboe concerto got a performance this weekend. “Two Dutch Beethoven enthusiasts have pieced together the musical clues, put them into 18th-century orchestral context and reconstructed the second movement of the only oboe concerto Beethoven ever wrote. The slow, melodic Largo movement of the Oboe Concerto in F Major was performed Saturday night in Rotterdam and billed as a ‘world premiere’ – even though the full concerto was performed at least once before, 210 years ago.”
In Quebec – A Fight To Keep A Book On The Shelves
In Quebec, from 1993 until last summer it was illegal to publish biographies of “persons living or dead without permission from the subject or his or her heirs.” So for seven years there were virtually no biographies published in Quebec. Just before the law’s reapeal, though, a writer got stuck on the horns of the law, and the matter is now in court…
The Closing Of A New-Music Friend
The closing of the new-music label CRI in January changed the classical music landscape. “CRI, for many listeners, was not just an entree into new music but appealed to an anarchic way of listening: adventurously, without expectations, and individually, as an explorer of sound unfettered by what authorities (critics, professors, pompous friends) dictate. Young listeners, tired of whatever music they were weaned on, could find music on CRI that was, by virtue of being the forgotten avant-garde of 20 years before, far more foreign and fascinating than the newest of the new.”
WTC: Protecting A Master Plan From The Gnats
“Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the former World Trade Center site, selected Wednesday, is a new noble, logical diagram – one that is sure to need a shield if real estate interests try to torture it with death by a thousand ‘gnat bites,’ as Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, so trenchantly put it. It inevitably will be changed, as all master plans are, as the economy rises and falls, as interest groups like the victims’ families make their voices heard, and as political actors enter and exit from the stage. The questions are: Will the change be for good or ill?”
Starting Over With A Develpment Plan
Now that a plan for the WTC site has been chosen, the real heavy lifting begins. One good first step, writes David Dillon, would be abandoning the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and Port Authority’s development plans and starting over. “The Port Authority’s program belongs to the 1960s, not the 21st century, and repeats many of the mistakes that made the World Trade Center a bad neighbor.”
Touring Orchestras – A Guaranteed Money-Loser
“It now costs about $1 million a week to send an orchestra on an international tour – maybe more. A million dollars might do if you’re talking about a standard 100-player orchestra. But some orchestras need more.” And the presenter of an orchestra is guaranteed to lose money too. “If we sell every seat in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, we are guaranteed to lose up to $50,000 per concert. However, if it’s a really special orchestra, our losses will go up dramatically. It’s quite a business.”
Vanity Books Set To Music
So you have a song you’ve written. So you hire pros to finish it up and record it. “The American Song-Poem Anthology: Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush” collects 28 mind-bendingly strange and very funny songs paid for by amateur lyricists and recorded by hard-up professional singers and musicians. ‘It’s the only scam I know of where each transaction is a unique work of art. Of course the work of art isn’t always great. These are vanity books set to music. But that’s what makes it so interesting. You have these very talented musicians working very rapidly to fulfill a quota of so many songs per hour, and sometimes the results transcend the limitations of the form’.”