Manfred Honeck’s “inaugural season with the PSO went about as well as one could imagine. The post-Jansons experiment with a trio of conductors instead of a music director bought time to find the right guy and integrated capable union musicians in the running of the orchestra.”
Tag: 06.21.09
Why Can’t We Concede Defeat?
“At the upper reaches of society, we litigate ever more readily and accept misfortune with ever less stoicism. Being fired from a job becomes the beginning of a negotiation, while a routine school suspension instantly goes to appeal. In part, this is probably the inevitable reckoning for a culture that gives trophies to every Little Leaguer because, as the saying goes, we’re all winners.”
Ali Akbar Khan , 87
“Khan established music schools in Calcutta, California (where he was based from 1965 onwards) and Switzerland. He toured throughout the world, and composed and recorded prolifically. Khan was “discovered” by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who first met him on a visit to India in 1952, declaring him to be “an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world”. Within three years, Menuhin had facilitated Khan’s breakthrough as an international artist, organising his American debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”
NY Gallery World Faces Contraction
“Aside from slashing prices or deepening discounts, art dealers across the city have been coping not just by laying off employees but by dropping artists with poor sales records, creating partnerships with other galleries and reaching out in desperation to tried-and-true customers, many of whom were priced out of the market during its peak. Still, with the exception of several blue-chip galleries who show well-known artists, foot traffic in Chelsea and other gallery precincts has thinned markedly where crowds jostled just a year ago.”
Frederick Ashton Ballets In Peril
“Choreography is the most fragile of art forms. The Balanchine repertory was lucky in that, within a few years of his death the Balanchine Trust was established to supervise stagings. But the Ashton repertory is in more perilous condition.”
A Dance Radical Picks Up The Conversation, Decades Later
“Back in the early 1970s, Yvonne Rainer was in the midst of a transition from postmodern dance maker to experimental film auteur. She still had all kinds of ideas for new dances, but she would jokingly send them to her friend, the choreographer Trisha Brown, instead of realizing them herself. It has only been in the last decade, after a request from a stellar admirer, that Rainer returned to dance, and now, at age 74, she finds herself firmly in the throes of her first artistic love.”
A New Culture Of Book Events As Performances
Recently there has been “a shift away from the traditional model of book readings and for-and-against Oxford Union-style debates and towards a showier kind of speaking event, in which bookish ideas and themes are lifted off the page and into the stuff of rhetoric and performance.”
Extraordinary Ravinia: Fans Pay For Bad Sound, No View And Big Hassle (And Love It!)
Is it worth the headache of cramming into an overstuffed Metra train with well-lubricated Lyle Lovett obsessives?.. And, of course, is it worth the cost? Can I still justify paying $15 to $30 for a ticket to a concert where I can’t even see the stage? Not “obstructed view.” No view.
Why Place Is A Literary Character
“For authors, tapping the power of place is not simply a matter of naming a town and then moving on with the story. The place is the story. Fiction is already ephemeral enough; the incidents therein never happened in the first place. What gives it gravity, what endows it with shape and mass and meaning, is its location.”
Death Of The Polka?
“The sad truth is that the world of polka — like all things that once enjoyed a great heyday — is shrinking, a fact the Grammy move has not only dramatized but documented.”