“As purely Russian as Diana Vishneva appears, she is one of the most cosmopolitan ballerinas of her generation. For over a decade she’s been a principal with both the Mariinsky Ballet in St Petersburg and American Ballet Theatre in New York, as well as jetting between numerous other companies worldwide.”
Tag: 04.12.15
A Holocaust Survivor, One Of The World’s Great Harpsichordists, Remembers The Liberation Of The Camps
Zuzana Ruzickova “was a survivor of Terezin and Auschwitz and Nazi slave labor in Hamburg. [She] was a prisoner in Bergen-Belsen and at the time of its liberation, she was 18 and weighed 60 pounds.”
It Never Ends: Diane Paulus On Preparing A New Musical For Broadway
“As hard as a revival is, a new musical is just on steroids harder. You’re constantly looking at your book, your music, your structure, and at the same time you’re trying to get at execution. So it’s not just ‘Can we make the number better?’ It’s ‘Is the number in the right place?'”
Do Some Of These Musicologists Even Like Music?
Ian Pace (yes, he’s a musicologist): “Unfortunately I have encountered too many academics – not a majority, but still too many – who have very little interest in listening to music, at least in a manner which requires any sustained attention. Some even have a sneering and superior attitude to anyone who really cares about music at all, and exhibits any enthusiasm for it. I have even had the misfortune to be faced by the argument that playing music in lectures is a waste of time.”
Data Says: Blue Is Increasing In Art
“How blue is the visual art of our era? Interpreting the data of 94,526 paintings created between 1800 CE and 2000 CE, Martin Bellander, a PhD student at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, discovered that blue has increased in art while orange has become less common.”
Berlin Cracks Down On Vacation Rentals As City Is Overrun With Tourists
“The ban was imposed to prevent the city from becoming victim to property owners who would rather rent their apartments for €700 per week to tourists rather than offer them to normal residents for much less. The law is also meant to show that city officials in Berlin are taking the fight against gentrification seriously.”
Get Real: Philosophy Looks To The Real World
“Where for decades or even centuries, philosophy has focused on our representations and descriptions of the world, on human consciousness and cultural systems, many are now turning to the external features of the world that constitute the content of our experiences and the context of our social practices.”
Philadelphia Orchestra’s Summer Season At City’s Mann Center Down To Two Weeks
“The Philadelphia Orchestra, which once played an 18-concert series in Fairmount Park, and more recently nine, will perform six this summer – and only three can be considered purely classical.” The venue’s CEO says she’d like more from the orchestra, whose administrators respond that they can’t schedule it.
Unschooling, Or Something Like It, Makes A Return To U.S. High Schools
“Now, teachers function more as coaches than lecturers and the students are active collaborators. Initially limited to the high school, the framework is now being phased in at the middle school, too. And while the extended-learning program, now five years old, predates the student-centered initiative, officials say it has been key to the turnaround.”
Women Are (Once Again?) Taking On, Or Taking Over, The Fantasy Genre
“While science-fiction and fantasy fans have always enjoyed female authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones and Ellen Kushner, Crisp believes the current swell in women writers is being led by a generation raised on Harry Potter and young adult fantasy fiction.”