“The Joffrey Ballet and the City of Chicago are teaming up for ‘Come Dance With Us,’ a week of free events in Millennium Park this summer as part of the troupe’s 50th anniversary celebration. The free events, to be held June 13-18, include a Joffrey performance at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, two outdoor concerts with the Grant Park Orchestra at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a bootdance spectacle in the outdoor Crown Fountain involving more than a dozen high school students, a parade of characters from ‘The Nutcracker’ and a late-night dance lesson to live music.”
Tag: 03.09.06
Potter Apology Could Fetch Thousands At Auction
“A letter from Beatrix Potter to a young fan apologising for the quality of one of her books, is expected to fetch up to £2,500 at auction in Exeter. The four-page letter to Joy Shapland was written by the Peter Rabbit author in 1913. In it, Potter apologises for her book The Tale of Pigland Bland, explaining that she had been feeling poorly.”
Spitzer’s Anti-Payola Crusade Marches On
“The nation’s fourth-largest radio company, Entercom Communications Corp., traded airtime for gifts and payments in a payola scam that included formalized programs to sell airplay to record labels, according to a suit filed Wednesday by New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer. The suit’s most serious allegations focus on Entercom’s ‘CD Preview’ and ‘CD Challenge’ programs, in which radio executives allegedly solicited payments to improve a song’s position on national airtime charts.”
MN Orch To Offer Free Online Concert Recordings
Following in the footsteps of other American orchestras which have begun to embrace online media, the Minnesota Orchestra has announced a partnership with Minnesota Public Radio, under which some of the orchestra’s live weekly broadcasts will be archived on MPR’s web site, where listeners will be able to listen to them, free of charge, for up to a year. MPR has already been offering live streaming audio of the popular Friday night broadcasts for several years, but the orchestra hopes that the free archived streams will increase its profile outside its home region.
McManus: Latest Louisville Proposal Doesn’t Add Up
The board of the Louisville Orchestra has made a new contract offer to its musicians which it says is less severe than its original plan to move 21 of the orchestra’s musicians from full-time to part-time status. But the plan involves paying $5,000 bonuses to 19 musicians who would subsequently have their salaries cut to part-time levels, and AJ blogger Drew McManus wonders where the board is planning to get $95,000 for bonuses when they claim not to have enough money to continue operating past March 31 of this year.
Famous Last Words
The just-resigned executive director of the Louisville Orchestra acknowledges that he may have been in over his head in the job, but says that “I gave it my absolutely best shot.” Scott Provancher had only run a small, part-time orchestra in Illinois before taking the Louisville job, but it appears that he may already have another job lined up – the orchestra’s board president says that he was contacted by a headhunter recently about Provancher.
“Smoking Gun” Unveiled At True Trial
Prosecutors at the trial of former Getty curator Marion True and art dealer Robert Hecht have entered into evidence photos that they say prove their claim that the Getty was knowingly trafficking in stolen antiquities. “Prosecutors also called on Italy’s art theft police to explain the web that they say links the defendants to tomb robbers and unscrupulous dealers.”
Crash Suit May Have Wider Implications
The lawsuit over producer credits for the Oscar-winning film, Crash, may seem like nothing more than a lot of Hollywood insider bickering. But there are a number of underlying issues at stake, and not all of them have to do with the vanity of movie people. Among other things, “[the] suit has raised a real issue for debate within Hollywood about the confidential arbitration process.”
A New Music Download Policy?
Recording companies are reconsidering their policy of selling singles online for download. “If the industry determines that restricting digital sales pays off with bigger album sales, fans may soon find the instant gratification of snapping up new songs online becoming a little less instant. No one is talking about a wholesale shift away from the now-common practice of selling singles online ahead of new albums.”