A winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions in 1964, the Canadian mezzo had a career at the Met and many North American companies, but she was best known as Joan Sutherland’s co-star on a series of opera recordings conducted by Richard Bonynge, including (among others) Norma, Maria Stuarda, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Les Contes d’Hoffmann.
Tag: 04.26.18
Controversial Statue Of Stephen Foster In Pittsburgh Comes Down
“The move followed an October decision by the Pittsburgh Art Commission, which found that the statue should be removed within six months and hosted in a private, ‘properly contextualized’ location. Many residents have held that the sculpture – showing a shoeless African-American banjo player seated at the famed composer’s feet – is condescending or outright racist. Speakers at commission meetings last year largely agreed.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.26.18
Homer And His Unique Way of Seeing
Winslow Homer has always been a complicated artist, and now he will be viewed as an even more complicated one. What’s going to do that is an exhibition opening in June at … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2018-04-26
A Dorough Tribute
In the aftermath of Bob Dorough’s death on Monday, increased attention is going to his extensive body of songs. Among Dorough’s greatest admirers is the Swedish trumpet player and singer Mårten Lundgren. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-04-26
The Bizarre Russian Big Money Culture Machine
Those who are familiar with the state’s cultural agenda in Russia are no longer surprised by these kinds of events, but it’s still difficult to get used to. You’re a good artist if you earn a lot, and preferably, have a wide audience. For the BraVo prize, as written on the website, any artist could be nominated, so long as they had the potential to “reach an audience of three billion.” In a state where culture, whether serious or for entertainment, still belongs to the service sector at the legislative level, more is more.
How Communist Bulgaria Became A Hotbed Of Thinking (And Worrying) About Robots
Bulgarian engineers and cyberneticians, champions of this new technology, increasingly worried about what this meant. In the ivory towers of places such as the Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics in Sofia, they wrote detailed papers on robotic movement, image recognition, planning algorithms. They ran experiments and built labs to test how to perfect Man-Machine Interfaces – from the design of the perfect office that would minimise an office worker’s eye-strain to the future melding of human and machine vision.
Small Study Suggests Childhood Trauma May Lead To More Intense Creative Experiences
A study of 234 performing-arts professionals found those who experienced intense childhood trauma—about 18 percent of the participants—reported higher levels of anxiety and internalized shame. But “they were also more fantasy prone, a factor that may enhance creativity,” write Paula Thomson of California State University–Northridge and S.V. Jaque of York University.
This Year’s Turner Prize Finalists
Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, who chairs the jury, said the judges had chosen “an outstanding group of artists, all of whom are tackling the most pressing political and humanitarian issues of today”.
Gianandrea Noseda Quits Turin Opera
The Teatro Regio appointed a new superintendent, William Graziosi, this week, which means Mr. Noseda would have had to reapply to keep his post as music director, the position he has held since 2007. Instead, he took his name out of contention, calling the theater’s recent actions “disappointing and disheartening.”
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker: Where Music And Dance Begin And End
“I never thought of music as just the basic energetic impulse that makes you want to dance; it was always like a textbook, something worth studying. If you consider choreography to be an organization of movement in space and time, then it is very instructive to look at scores and understand how composers organize their material. Both are embodiments of the same idea—music does it in a more abstract way and choreography is more concrete.”
A Ballet Danced By Snails Wearing LEDs
“On a Friday night in central London, 176 shelled gastropods ‘dance’ around me … to a stretched-out, 47-minute long looping rendition of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, played at 35 BPM – the tempo of a snail’s heartbeat. The whole thing may sound like a Trent Reznor studio experiment (Nine Inch Snails, if you will), but this is in fact Slow Pixel, an interactive art installation that urges its audience to take life at a snail’s pace.”