“Lawrence M. Small, the former secretary of the Smithsonian, rarely used his Northwest Washington mansion for institution-related entertaining in the past four years, despite receiving a housing allowance totaling $1.1 million since 2000 to make his residence available for official functions, institution records released yesterday show.”
Tag: 04.19.07
$5m For Barnes Scholarship
The Barnes Foundation, which is in the planning stages of a controversial move from Lower Merion, PA to central Philadelphia, has received a $5 million challenge grant to help it build “a permanent endowment for scholarly studies…[The Barnes] has already raised $150 million toward a new building in Philadelphia, programs and endowment. An additional $50 million is being sought to further bolster the endowment.”
Theatre: Now With Free Home Delivery!
Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine going to the theatre with snooping around your friends’ apartments? A strange new production making the rounds of loft apartments in Manhattan is starting to attract attention as it plays to a few dozen audience members at a time. “The effect is something like watching a psychology experiment through a conspicuous one-way mirror, knowing that everyone on both sides is only pretending not to be seen.”
Operetta Chancellor? Ouch, Babe.
The battle between Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and the dedicated opera fans who want him to stop sticking his nose into the search for the next director of the Vienna State Opera is getting awfully operatic itself. “The leftist Green Party labeled him ‘an operetta chancellor who considers art important only if he can put himself on center stage.’ Thomas Trenkler, an editor of the Vienna newspaper Der Standard, wrote that Mr. Gusenbauer was misusing ‘art as a political stage.'”
The Last Of The Avant-Garde?
Choreographer Merce Cunningham is 88 years old. Not that you’d notice. “The dances he has made this millennium suggest, amazingly, that no choreographer alive is more concerned with continuing to extend his range… Often what’s distinctive occurs at the basic level of dance vocabulary. One of the supreme step-makers of all time, he delights in splicing one known step onto another to come up with something unprecedented.”
Cannes Announces 2007 Lineup
Directors vying for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival will include Quentin Tarantino, Gus van Sant, and Hong Kong director Wang Kar Wei. Cannes has also announced the lineup of films that will appear out of competition, including a new documentary by controversial leftist filmmaker Michael Moore.
Zehetmair’s Baton
Like so many before him, violinist Thomas Zehetmair has turned to conducting as a side career. But unlike so many other baton-wielding wannabes, he seems to be uniquely suited to the task, and has managed to dovetail the work nicely with his performing career, which has always focused on the thorny contemporary music that most speaks to him.
Canadian Painting Withdrawn From Sale Again
“No one wants to gather rosebuds, it seems. For the second time in five years, the Canadian owners of Sir John William Waterhouse’s Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May have withdrawn their large and luscious Pre-Raphaelite oil painting from auction. The painting, an oil-on-canvas allegory of the transience of youth and beauty, failed to reach what its vendors regarded as its minimum value at a Sotheby’s bidding room in New York yesterday afternoon. Sotheby’s catalogue had listed an expected price range of $1.75-million to $2.5-million.”
Deneve Reups In Scotland
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has announced that music director Stephane Deneve has extended his contract through the 2010-11 season. Deneve has been a major hit in Scotland, as attendance at RSNO concerts has jumped by a whopping 30% since his arrival.
ENO’s Latest Sacrificial Lamb Music Director
The English National Opera has seemed to be in a perpetual state of crisis over the past few years. So when Edward Gardner signed on to be the company’s new music director, the question most observers had was why he would have wanted the job. “Is this inexperienced young man – whose biggest job to date has been as music director of Glyndebourne’s touring arm, hardly the white-hot centre of searing controversy – up to the traumas of being a public figure as well as the musical heart of this well-loved but somewhat disaster-prone company?”