“The theory that musicians’ liking a conductor personally or musically will foreshadow a distinguished partnership is false. Some of the conductors most admired today were, in fact, hated by their musicians.”
Tag: 03.16.08
A Historic Chicago Theatre Awaits Its Next Act
It’s been three months since new ownership was announced for the Chicago Theatre, the landmark theatre in the heart of the Windy City. So why no announcements about what’s going to happen there?
The Ticketmaster Weasel Walk
The CEO of Ticketmaster “was presented a grand opportunity to make a case for Ticketmaster as a company that doesn’t deserve its reputation for gouging consumers and kicking back the spoils to its clients. But his responses were the equivalent of a carefully tailored corporate press release that pretends to say something profound while in reality thumbing its nose at the recipient.”
Remembing The Wonder That Was Polaroid
“If Polaroids were a movie, they’d be ‘The Truman Show.’ If they were novels, Philip K. Dick would have written them. How much you want to bet all the pictures in R. Buckminster Fuller’s family albums are Polaroids? They’re obsolete and futuristic at the same time, which is a hard trick to pull off, but the glory – and downfall – of Polaroid was managing to do it.”
Dawn Upshaw, Reinvented
“The reborn, newly healthy Upshaw has reinvented herself as a performer who is also a co-creator. She works with composers such as Golijov and Kaija Saariaho, whose oratorio about Resistance martyr Simone Weil, La Passion de Simone, she sang at the Barbican last summer, and extends commissions to a new generation of musicians like David Bruce, a young Englishman whose chamber opera will be performed this month by the students Upshaw coaches.”
The Confusion Of American Art
“American art, as Robert Hughes has written, oscillates between dependence and invention. You could also say that it can’t, or couldn’t, decide just how American it ought to be. On the one hand were those who believed in the transcendency of the landscape; painters who saw manifest destiny in the Hudson River or Niagara Falls, and those all-American originals like Peto and Homer. On the other were those Modernists touched by Europe.”
Hollywood’s Changing View Of Immigrants?
“Though the American film industry was founded largely by enterprising immigrants and has been fed by successive streams of talented émigrés, Hollywood has generally preferred to depict an idealized, homogeneous America, where the nonwhite and the nonnative linger in the margins and the shadows.”
Lang Lang’s Next Act?
“Now only 25 – and having just appeared on the Grammy Awards telecast – Lang Lang has been there, done that so globally and repeatedly you have to wonder: Are there any new things left for a concert pianist to experience? There are.”
America Is Anti-Intellectual – Read And Discuss
“In a nation that boasts more educated people, college graduates, books sold and general literacy than ever before, intellectually oriented people patronize institutions that pay attention to sophisticated print culture – universities, colleges, Web sites, publications, radio shows – and dump those that aim at bottom-level taste.”
Stratford Leadership Turmoil Worthy Of Shakespeare
“We want to believe the parties involved are, in Marc Antony’s words, ‘all honourable men.’ But the early talk pointing the finger at surviving artistic director Des McAnuff might yet yield to another theory- that the same combination of envy and misguided idealism that motivated Cassius and Brutus is the source of the current troubles.”