Tag: 03.18.07

Iraq’s Orchestra – Performance In A War Zone

“‘We are challenging the situation by trying to not be too far from the public. We are trying to put on a concert every month, but circumstances are very difficult. So the performances that the orchestra do put on are private and rarefied, little events for a small audience who do not have to travel very far or have their own security, and put on mainly at the city’s two subscription – only ‘country clubs’. Other events are by invitation only, for government officials and diplomats from the Green Zone. Even Iraq’s music has become gated.”

The Rise Of The Writer-Director

“Almost since the beginning of Hollywood, writers have written themselves into becoming directors — the long list includes Billy Wilder, Barry Levinson and Oliver Stone. What’s changed is the number of opportunities available in the form of billionaires and quasi-billionaires eager to take a chance on proven names who want to direct. Indeed, almost everyone listed above — even those such as Frank and August, whose films earned billions for the studios — was financed independently.”

Remembering Peggy Guggenheim’s Art Of This Century

The iconic gallery opened in 1942 in New York. “It was an immediate success. The opening night was thronged. There was plenty of publicity, and over the following five years it was in this bizarre fantasy of a gallery – and not in a purist white cube environment – that Guggenheim exhibited the work of younger American painters such as Pollock.”

Other-Languagey Shakespeare

“It’s often the case that Shakespeare seems fresher and more inventive when performed in a language other than English. In fact Shakespeare performed in a language other than English often has a liberating effect on both audiences and directors. Yes, of course you lose the poetry, but Shakespeare was a playwright first and foremost: the text is only one part of the experience, and one that sometimes seems overfamiliar.”

Ian McKellan, Global Star

“True, Ian McKellen is not Tom Hanks, nor would he want to be. ‘Oh, it would be totally miserable,’ he said after witnessing the logistical nightmare that is global celebrity. But he remains an actor with a serious following who manages, through a tendency to playfulness, to avoid seeming either elitist or diffident. Certainly, he is not wary of his fans. He reaches out to them – and they to him – through one of the web’s most dizzyingly garish sites, mckellen.com, which he describes as a substitute for the autobiography he will never write.”

Uffizi’s Leonardo Treasure Arrives In Japan

Leonardo’s The Annunciation arrived safely in Tokyo from Italy’s Uffizi in Florence. “Some 15 specialists took more than an hour to remove the 15th-century painting from a triple-layer protective crate of wood and metal and hang it at the Tokyo National Museum. Plans to send the Renaissance painting to Japan sparked protests in Italian cultural circles, including from the director of the Uffizi, who said the work — which had not left Florence since 1945 — was too fragile to be transported.”

Music From The Concentration Camps

Composers who were prisoners during World War II generally never saw their work performed or receive the attention it might have had in other times. “Italian researchers hope thousands of nearly forgotten works will find new life as they assemble a library of music composed or played in those dark places between 1933 and 1945. ‘We are trying to right a great wrong: These musicians were hoping for a musical life for themselves, and they would have had it if their destiny had been different’.”

New Lessons From Modernism

Have today’s leading architects learned the wrong lessons from modernism’s mistakes? “The swing away from the austere modernist credo — form follows function, all else is decadence — was inevitable. But that aesthetic development didn’t have to be combined with a flight from urban planning, although the two issues are intertwined in complex ways.”

Time For Your Star Turn

“Finn is the latest example of a burgeoning — and commercially successful — literary genre: works that appropriate minor characters from major fiction or drama and award them starring roles. For reasons both legal and historical, 19th century American fiction has seemed especially ripe for revision. The trend may represent a delayed reaction to the ‘new social history’ of the 1970s, in which women, minorities and working people emerged from the background to assume bigger speaking parts.”