After 45 years performing, the Guarneri Quartet is packing it in. “Founded in 1964 at the Marlboro Music Festival, the quartet is noted for its stellar interpretations of repertoire ranging from 18th- and 19th-century standards to Bartók, Stravinsky and Walton. The group’s award-winning recordings of Beethoven’s middle-period quartets were followed by an Edison Award in 1971 and premieres of works by Hans Werner Henze and Ned Rorem in the ’90s.”
Tag: 06.11.07
Dance Out In The World
“The widely-held notion that dance is ephemeral is a major roadblock on the path to freeing dance from the proscenium stage. While live performances are wonderful and in some ways unique, they also can be replicated – with important changes and accommodations for each medium. But if most people in the dance community never question whether dance has to be a fleeting experience, there will be very little incentive to explore and invest in new approaches to preserving these performances for future generations.”
Darcy Bussell’s Farewell
in pictures…
Historic Italian Palace Back On Line
“The Reggia di Venaria Reale outside Turin is said to have provided Louis XIV with the inspiration for his palace at Versailles. But, by the end of the 1990s, the 80 hectares (200 acres) of land surrounding it had become little more than a wasteland. But yesterday, the reconstructed gardens were reopened to the public – the latest step in what the head of the regional government, Mercedes Bresso, has called ‘the biggest restoration project under way in Europe’.”
China – Tearing Down Cities To Make Them The Same?
“Throughout the country, old buildings are making way for residential towers, office blocks and motorways. Developers have torn down tens of thousands of traditional courtyard homes in Beijing, countless colonial-era neighbourhoods in Shanghai and swaths of other historical cities. In their place are wide streets, concrete squares and huge right-angled buildings — often with the same small white tiles and blue-tinted windows.”
Why Upper Classes Have Disappeared From UK Fiction
“A serious writer would be foolhardy indeed to present a modern aristocrat as a complex central protagonist. The upper classes are considered no more than cardboard cut-outs: one-dimensional, braying inbreds sitting grandly on their green acres and writing love letters to General Pinochet.”
Laureate Strikes Out At Reading Programs
Michael Rosen is Britain’s newly-appointed children’s laureate. He doesn’t think much of current reading education programs: “I utterly resent and reject the notion that you can teach reading without books. There is a huge push on to create an environment – in nurseries, and reception, and year ones and year twos – where books are secondary to the process of reading. This seems oxymoronic to me. We must, must have at the heart of learning to read the pleasure that is reading. Otherwise why bother?”
Hollywood Worries About Apple TV
“Despite Apple TV’s promise, some of the biggest movie studios won’t sell their films through Apple’s iTunes store. They fear that the Cupertino, Calif., company will come to dominate online distribution of movies as it now controls more than 70% of the digital-music market in the United States. If it does, that could drive down the prices of newly released DVDs, which is great for consumers but bad business for the movie studios.”
Oscar Peterson Misses His Own Tribute
The Carnegie Hall tribute was an all-star gala to celebrate the famous Canadian jazz pianist. “On an evening dedicated to celebrating the Canadian jazz giant’s career, one which organizers had privately hoped would provide him with one last opportunity to take the stage where he first snagged the world’s attention with a surprise 1949 appearance, Peterson, 81, was at the last minute declared too ill to make the trip.”
Top Random House Editor Departing
Daniel Menaker, executive editor in chief of the Random House, is leaving the publisher. “The move seemed to be an indication that Random House was shrugging off the sophisticated literary fiction that Mr. Menaker had nurtured. But Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of Random House, insisted that the direction of the imprint would not change.”