The star tenor, sidelined for a year due to health and vocal problems including a cyst on his vocal folds, made a one-time, quickly scheduled appearance in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at the Vienna State Opera on Monday night. He got 60 seconds of applause just for entering and enjoyed a 25-minute ovation after the final curtain. How did he sound?
Tag: 03.23.10
Alexie’s ‘War Dances’ Takes PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award
“Seattle author Sherman Alexie has added another award to his groaning shelf of literary trophies – the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for his book of short stories, essays and poems, War Dances.”
Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh Share $1M Dan David Prize
“Canadian author Margaret Atwood and lndian-Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh have been awarded the Dan David Prize and will share the $1 million US award. The prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation out of Tel Aviv University and ‘recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms’.”
Unlike Hanoi, Saigon Has No Time For The Arts
“[One] might conclude that this expansive metropolis, which is experiencing dramatic growth and is quickly turning into a major Asian business center, is a city of culture. It isn’t. … [The] arts are such a hard sell in a city where the old Saigon is being pushed aside by tall modern buildings, fancy shops and hordes of international hustlers looking to make a killing.”
Fess Parker, The Luckiest Man In Hollywood
“It’s surely the dream of every red-blooded American to be catapulted from obscurity to celebrity, to one day knock on the right door and see it swing ajar to reveal a lifetime’s bounty of riches. ‘Dream on,’ you’re probably scoffing, and with good reason. Yet this is precisely what happened, back in the nascent era of television, to a lanky young actor down on his luck by the name of Fess Parker.”
Study: Artists Have Plumped Up Last Supper Portion Sizes
“In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American fare, a pair of sibling scholars has turned to an unusual source: 52 artists’ renderings of the New Testament’s Last Supper. … Over the course of the millennium, [they] found that the entrees depicted on the plates laid before Jesus’ followers grew by about 70%, and the bread by 23%.”
How Legitimate Is The ‘Lost’ Shakespeare Play?
Both Arden Shakespeare and the English professor who championed “Double Falsehood” to the publisher guardedly say they’re convinced it might be Shakespeare’s work, at least in part. “So, we may have not exactly a ‘new Shakespeare play,’ but a play that turns out to have a lot of Shakespeare – ‘fossil verses,’ [the professor] calls them – in it.”
In A Balkanized Existence, Topography Unites
“You travel with your tribe, you reinforce each other’s opinions, you track the same Web sites and you draw from the same wells of information. … What gets lost in such curated cocoons is the sense of what we share: the Bay Area geography, the built and natural forces that shape every one of our lives.” (second item)
Who Needs The Boston Public Library Anyway?
“Why pack kids in for story time … when there’s undoubtedly an App for that?” Sage Stossel’s illustrated lament over proposed library cuts and closures.
Poetic Cultural Synthesis In Jean Nouvel’s Qatar Museum
“Every level of Mr. Nouvel’s project, from its materials to its dominant forms to its sprawling layout, reflects a richly imaginative effort to retain a connection to the fading world of the Bedouins from which modern Qatar sprang, while also embracing the realities of a rapidly urbanizing society.”