“At a news conference in the Grand Ballroom of the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue, Gov. Rendell announced that the state would contribute $25 million toward construction of a new home for the Merion museum on the site of the Youth Study Center, between 20th and 21st Streets. The grant announced yesterday is one of the largest such grants ever dispensed from Harrisburg.”
Tag: 03.29.06
Chill Winds Blowing From FCC
“These days, apparently, the human condition on broadcast TV does not include any sexual behavior. Following sweeping Federal Communications Commission indecency decisions two weeks ago that resulted in proposed fines of more than $4 million against more than 125 TV stations, the WB has snipped every last sexy interlude from a pilot version it had already approved.”
SF Opera To Simulcast Outside
San Francisco Opera is following the lead of other companies such as Covent Garden, and will simulcast its first opera of this summer’s season. Tyhe broadcast will take place in an outdoor plaza. “What we want is to establish an overall image of the company as being community-friendly and very accessible, and to emphasize what I believe — which is that opera as an art form is accessible. Civic Center Plaza could accommodate as many as 12,000 to 15,000 at the outside if the circumstances were right. But I’d be happy with 5,000.”
Chamber Group Disbands Because Of Success
The Music Toronto Chamber Society played its last program this week. But the group is disbanding not because it can’t survive, but because its members have too much else to do…
Gold-Plated “Ring” (At Least The Tickets Are)
“The Kirov Opera’s Ring Cycle, which tours to the Wales Millennium Centre in November, sold out in just three hours on Monday. The cheapest tickets were £80 (standing, mind you) and the most expensive (wait for it) £750. My first thought was: you could have a luxury holiday for that. The second went something like this: stand? Eighteen hours? £80? What madness is this?”
Canadian Broadcasters Buying US TV, Not Canadian
Canadian broadcasters are spending more money on buying American shows than they are on Canadian shows. “Last year we were shocked that so-called Canadian private broadcasters spent four times more on U.S. programming than they did on original Canadian drama. Now we’re appalled to learn that in 2005, they spent almost five times more. The system is clearly broken.”
Music By Phone Scores Big
Music to Mobile phones is a huge hit in the UK. “Nearly 7% of all chart music bought this year has been downloaded through a mobile service. That represents nearly 70,000 chart singles bought every week by people on the move. Users of the 3G network 3 account for more than half the total sales with the rest coming from Vodafone and Orange.”
Where’s The Operatic Shakesepeare?
The Royal Shakespeare Company is staging the complete works of Shakespeare. So why don’t the operas based on the Bard get performed more often? There are “more than 400 operatic adaptations of the plays – 40 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream alone. The archive of Shakespeare in opera is also rich in aborted projects. Mendelssohn, Schumann, Glinka, Bizet and Prokofiev all dreamed of setting Hamlet.”
A First: Download Makes No. 1 On UK Charts
For the first time, a song sold through downloads has reached No. 1 on the UK pop charts. “Until this month, download sales could only count towards a chart position if it was also available to buy in stores. But a change in the rules has enabled download sales to be considered – as long as physical copies of the single go on sale the following week.”
Naipaul: Joyce Is Incomprehensible, James Is The Worst
Nobel novelist VS Naipaul has lashed out at literary greats, including as Jane Austin and Henry James. “Naipaul said Thomas Hardy was ‘an unbearable writer’ who ‘doesn’t know how to compose a paragraph’. And Ernest Hemingway ‘was so busy being an American’ he ‘didn’t know where he was’.”