“I was by no means always an opera fan, and it was the singing that got me in the end. My grandmother and parents had taken me to see a couple of productions when I was younger in the hope of firing some latent interest, but it didn’t really grab me. Then, one day in my 20s, I heard a CD of my wife’s of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. I had no story to go on, no costumes, no set, no visuals at all, just a series of the most extraordinary voices singing insanely beautiful music. Hooked, I was. So hooked that all these years later I practically begged Glyndebourne to let me help present this weekend’s inaugural Glyndebourne Opera Cup competition for young singers.”
Tag: 03.22.18
Are University Degrees In Curating Useful?
“The result of BA courses in curating will be a bunch of 21 year olds who will be theoretically savvy, but have little idea why particular works of art have a particular resonance at a particular time. They will be around £30,000 poorer after paying tuition fees – probably more, given their living costs – and they will realistically have few immediate employment prospects in the field of curating. Still, they can probably always go on to teach on a curating course.”
Surgeons Removed A Chunk Of His Brain, But His Virtuoso Guitar Skills Remained
“Pat Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy. It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and memory gone, but his guitar skills intact.”
What’s Killing Venice? The Moral Failure Of Its Government, Says Curator
“He rightly identifies one of the reasons behind the decline as being economic liberalism, which has led to the opening up of the Italian cultural sphere to private enterprise. He sees that it has encouraged a naive selling-out to the profit motive —as with the huge advertisements that for years defiled Venice—but he could, perhaps, have added that this has happened because the reasons for the symbiosis between the public and private sectors that exists in the UK and USA have not been understood by successive Italian governments.”
Statue Of African American Woman To Replace Confederate General In US Capitol
The civil rights leader and educator Mary McLeod Bethune will be the first African American figure to be honored with a monument in the National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol. Fittingly, Bethune will replace a Confederate general.
New Thinking On How Great Dance Companies Can Survive Their Founders
“Such groups are expanding their structures and missions, but for the successful artists who built them decades ago, doing so means making major changes to the way they’ve always operated. For some, it means passing the baton. The best-case scenarios emerge with input from the one person—the founder—who usually (and understandably) doesn’t want to talk about her own mortality. Still, avoiding the problem only increases the risk that one’s work will no longer be performed and philanthropic supporters will walk away.”
Why Picasso Is So Massively Popular In East Asia (Yes, Even More Than In The West)
“Asian travellers are flocking to museums in the West to admire his artistic creations. Multi-million dollar paintings by the prolific artist have become the most sought after objects of desire among affluent Asian collectors in recent years. The reputations of other Western artists are no match to that of Picasso’s in this part of the world. Picasso is simply a synonym for Western art.” Vivienne Chow explores the reasons – which are much more than just the stratospheric prices his work commands.
Trump Wanted To Eliminate NEA, NEH. Congress Just Increased Their Budgets
“The final version of the federal budget was rolled out on Wednesday, and not only does it maintain funding levels for federal arts programs, it actually increases them. The NEA and NEH will receive $355 million in 2018 — an increase in five million from the year before. Meanwhile, $445 million has been allocated to CPB — the same total as last year.”
Why Do Dictators Keep Fancying Themselves Literary Authors?
“How can you be a dictator without your sacred text, without a document to show your word is law?” From Lenin’s dense treatises and Hitler’s notorious memoir, through Mao’s “little red book” of aphorisms and Kim Jong-Il’s critical treatises on cinema and opera, to Türkmenbashi’s faux-folklore and Saddam Hussein’s romance novels, they just can’t stop themselves from churning out books. Colin Dickey examines the what and why.
Can The Classical Music World Just Drop The Whole ‘Maestro’ Thing Already?
“Amid the manifold campaigns to make classical music more accessible, less patriarchal, to take itself less absolutely seriously and to crack a smile – if not a joke – the outdated term is getting slightly grating to read. … [And] ‘maestro’ doesn’t fool anybody. If anything, it reveals a kind of uniquely fragile masculinity that sips time and again from the elixir of self-proclaiming ‘greatness’ in order to reaffirm its own status. The musicians, at least, don’t fall for it.”