Tag: 03.06.18

Vladimir Jurowski Will Be Next Music Director Of Munich’s Bavarian State Opera

The well-funded company, among the world’s busiest and considered among its best, has engaged Jurowski, currently chief conductor of the London Philharmonic and formerly music director of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, beginning in 2021. He will be joined at the company by a new superintendent, Serge Dorny, who currently runs the Opéra national de Lyon in France.

The Future Of Choral Music: On Its Own Track

“It’s no shocker to say that the choral and instrumental worlds have evolved quite separately over the past century. Highly chromatic or atonal music is rarely written for choirs, and the deep exploration of timbre found in instrumental pieces from later in the 20th century has mostly been ignored in favor of the pervasive choral sound inherited from the English cathedral tradition. Not only have the two worlds evolved separately, but their cultural importance is weighed differently as well.”

The Unfashionable Mr. Lloyd Webber Writes A Memoir

It is fashionable among theater intellectuals to look down on Lloyd Webber’s musicals: their catchy tunes, their ripe orchestrations, their puzzling stories (“The story of Evita is simple” is perhaps the book’s most controversial claim, starkly undermined by the ensuing plot summary) and of course their commercial success. But by his own admission in “Unmasked,” Lloyd Webber has never been fashionable.

Three Ballets About ‘The Nature Of Woman’, All Created By Men – This ‘Epitomises Everything In Ballet That Needs To Change’

Luke Jennings: “The problem with Femmes – a new triple-bill from Les Grands Ballets Canadiens – “apart from the sheer, kitsch ghastliness of the concept, is that it epitomises the lack of agency of women in classical dance. The reverence for the feminine implied by Balanchine’s quote [‘Ballet is woman’] has always been contingent on women knowing their place. Ballet relies on women to make up most of its performing workforce, but overwhelmingly reserves positions of artistic power for men.”

Boston’s Pair Of Rembrandt Portraits Gets Badly-Needed Restoration

“The two paintings, ‘Portrait of a Woman Wearing a Gold Chain’ and ‘Portrait of a Man Wearing a Black Hat,’ are a keystone in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ expanding collection of works by the Dutch masters. And now, for the first time in at least 50 years, both works are undergoing a painstaking restoration that could reveal new secrets in these familiar faces.” Says curator Ronni Baer, “They’ll just look like they’re alive again. Right now, they just look dead.”