Dr. Ruth McAllister looks at contemporary testimony about Gesualdo and his relationships with others, including his second wife, a rival composer, musicians employed by someone else whom he dressed down to their faces, a former mistress tried for witchcraft, and one of his uncles, St. Carlo Borromeo.
Tag: 03.23.15
Women Of The Floating World: The Lives Of Japan’s Edo-Period Courtesans
While most of the art depicting the Yoshiwara pleasure district in what is now Tokyo was basically marketing made by and for men, we can still get a picture of the complex world in which the women there lived and worked.
The Revolution Is… Where Do Movies Go From Here?
“Cinema is gone—everyone agrees. And yet cinema also abides, if only so that Jean-Luc Godard can go on delivering valedictions to what it used to be. Like the history of which it’s a part, the moving image has not finished its work, nor is it likely to anytime soon. I think it’s just gotten a little too much into itself.”
Nederlands Dans Theater’s Do-It-Themselves Fundraiser For NGOs
“Switch is an evening conceived, choreographed and produced fully by the NDT performers … all profits from [which] go entirely to a community need the dancers hunt down themselves. … When they’ve targeted an organization, they look for ways to get involved beyond financial contribution. They volunteer their hours, they show up to teach free workshops, they raise awareness.”
How Philip Glass Changed American Music
“Whatever the long-term prospects for Glass’s music may be, no one now doubts its historic significance. One reason musical modernism finally collapsed under its own weight in the 1970s was that Glass and his like-minded contemporaries refused to kowtow to the anti-tonal regime of the postwar avant-garde musical monopoly. As a result, there is no longer a “mainstream” classical-music style.”
Why Are So Many Arts Organizations’ Mission Statements So Bad?
“Yuck! Those are awful, and for different reasons. Some are dumb. Some are unclear. But all are more about the “what” of the organization more than the “why.” There is no expression or explanation of their purpose, no sense of what they are doing that is good for us.”
Time For Domingo To Retire, Says NY Times Chief Critic
Anthony Tommasini, reviewing Verdi’s Ernani at the Met: “The time to stop will just come to [Domingo] when it’s right, he explained. ‘I think it will be one evening,’ he said, ‘after a performance, to say, ‘That’s it.’ It may be the moment for Mr. Domingo to heed his own words.”
Akhil Sharma’s “Family Life” Wins £40,000 Folio Prize For Fiction
The Indian-American banker-turned-author won the second-ever award “for a novel which took him 13 long and painful years to complete, charting one emigrant family’s heartwrenching search for the American dream.”
After Fire, London’s Battersea Arts Centre Gets £1 Million Emergency Funding
“Half the money will help the venue to find an off-site location that will enable it to accommodate productions that were due to be staged in the Grand Hall. The rest … will go towards BAC’s ongoing £13 million redevelopment project, which needed an additional £500,000 to reach its target.”
What ‘Pretty Woman’ Would Have Been Like If They’d Shot The Original Script (Ugly)
“In its original form, which you can read here, it was neither a Cinderella story nor a romantic comedy – it was a cynical, rather depressing tale of a junkie prostitute and the rich asshole she spends a week with. Neither of them is particularly likable, either at the beginning of the story or its conclusion.”