The 15-year-old symphony said it needs to raise twice that much – $300,000 – before it can consider presenting a 2012-13 season of concerts starting in the fall.
Tag: 04.12.12
Minnesota Orchestra Faces Year Of Living Dangerously
“Last December, the organization reported its biggest annual deficit ever. In June, the band evacuates Orchestra Hall for a yearlong face-lift of its iconic home on Nicollet Mall. A shortened 2012-13 season opens in October in the acoustically challenged Minneapolis Convention Center.” Then there are the upcoming contract negotiations …
Marta Eggerth, Operetta Star, Still Sharp And Still Singing At 100
“People ask me, How is it to be 100? I say, I don’t know. I have no standard of comparison. You must ask me when I am 200 what it was like to be 100, and then I will be able to tell you.”
Soprano Ailyn Pérez Wins 2012 Richard Tucker Award
The $30,000 prize “is conferred annually on an American opera singer at the threshold of a major international career.” Pérez’s husband, tenor Stephen Costello, received the award in 2009.
Ancient Chinese Zither Makes 21st-Century Comeback
“For much of the 20th century, the contemplative guqin – the favored instrument of Confucius – has lacked an understanding audience and been eclipsed by showier musical instruments, including Western imports like piano and violin. But, after decades in the shadows of China’s musical life, the guqin is making a comeback, riding a wave of renewed interest in the nation’s traditional culture and the government’s efforts to promote this.”
After 60 Years, West Australian Ballet Gets Its Own Home
“From cramped conditions at His Majesty’s Theatre, the company has now moved into the $12 million heritage-listed State WA Ballet Centre in [suburban] Maylands, which has been transformed to contain purpose-built studios, a ballet school, costume workshops and a cafe.”
Was Thomas Kinkade So Very Different From Damien Hirst?
Hirst, like Kinkade, “has been criticized for his determined profit-seeking, for inflated prices, for using assistants to produce his work, even for a general lack of originality … But Hirst is seen as a conceptualist – his art is these brilliant money-making ideas themselves. Why don’t we see Kinkade in a similar light? What Kinkade was selling was also ideas: a mythical America, a pink-dawned, Christian cartoonscape of flowers, waterfalls and Disneyland.”