The job of ballet conductor is far more than a simple stick-waving exercise. Synchronizing music and dance is a tremendously difficult undertaking, and it takes a cool head and a keen eye to adjust an entire orchestra to the sometimes unpredictable whims of the performers on stage. So it was a bit of a surprise when San Francisco Ballet tapped an unusually young man to be its new pit conductor, but 37-year-old Martin West loves a challenge, and initial reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.
Tag: 03.11.06
Homeless New Orleans Publisher Auctions Off His Treasures
“An auction of first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski raised $225,000 in San Francisco to benefit a publisher left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.”
Fox Steps Out Of The Freying Pan
Disgraced memoirist James Frey’s Hollywood dreams may be as dead as his credibility. “Before Oprah Winfrey castigated Frey for ‘duping’ her with his book earlier this year, the writer sold Fox a script for a one-hour, apparently tongue-in-cheek crime drama.” But in the wake of all the negative publicity surrounding Frey, “Fox has quietly killed the pilot.”
Anna Moffo, 73
Glamorous soprano Anna Moffo, who starred on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera for more than two decades, has died at her home in New York, aged 73. Moffo’s career was memorable but short – her voice deteriorated badly and forced her to retire from the stage while still in her 40s.
Fireworks At DaVinci Trial
“Heated verbal exchanges erupted yesterday in the closing stages of the Da Vinci Code copyright court case, in which two historians are accusing author Dan Brown of lifting their research in his bestseller.”
On The Fringes Of Success
There was a time when the only real gain you could achieve by being included in the New York Fringe Festival was the satisfaction of a job well done, and hopefully, a few tepid reviews. But ever since Urinetown leaped from the Fringe to Broadway back in 1999, the festival has become a whole new ball game, with any number of people keeping score.
Toscanini’s Comeback
Arturo Toscanini was already in his eighties when NBC began a seven-year series of live telecasts of the maestro and his NBC Symphony Orchestra. “This was the first major attempt to bring symphonic music to television; the Leonard Bernstein ‘Young People’s Concerts’ began in the late ’50s. Now virtually all of Toscanini’s television work has been reissued on five DVDs by the enterprising Testament label, and it provides a terrific answer to that perpetual question: ‘What is it that a conductor does, exactly?'”
The Palace Restoration No One Wanted
Yemen’s Amiriya Palace was built 400 years ago, but abandoned only 13 years later. For centuries it was ignored and abused until an archaeologist came along in the 1980s and insisted it be restored. It was the restoration no one wanted, but as the decades went on and the work continued, a real treasure emerged…
That’s Ridiculous
“Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression; its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended. That is why cartoons and other forms of ridicule have for centuries, even when illegal, been among the most important weapons of both noble and wicked political movements.”