Bayreuth has only just opened and German newspapers are pondering whether the festival circuit has become too much. “The festivals in Bayreuth and Salzburg are the most prominent examples of an increasingly close network of festivals that now stretch across Europe from the south Pole to Andalusia,”
Tag: 06.26.06
New York ATtempts To Rebuild Arts Education
“Student-teacher ratios for the arts can be staggering. According to data provided by the department to the City Council this fall, there is 1 visual arts teacher for every 943 students and 1 music teacher for every 1,200. For dance and theater the numbers are even more extreme, with 1 dance teacher for every 8,088 students, and 1 theater teacher for every 8,871. Although about 40,000 teachers have been added to the New York City school system since 1975 — bringing the current total to about 84,000 — no more than 2,000 of them are arts specialists, according to the Center for Arts Education, a nonprofit group. Experts estimate it would cost $150 million to $200 million to hire arts specialists for every school, and the blueprint has no funds attached.”
Nationalist Rhetoric: Now With Counterpoint!
That Iran’s extremist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has nuclear ambitions for his country is no secret – indeed, it’s front page news around the world nearly every day. But Ahmadinejad apparently feels the need to trumpet his plans in a more literal sense. He has commissioned a “nuclear symphony” from an Iranian composer, and the work’s debut will be given next week in Tehran.
Does “The Daily Show” Hurt Democracy?
“Two university professors have published a study claiming that Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart’ drives down support for political institutions and makes young people more cynical about government.”
Ratmansky’s Big-Theme Thinking
“The great thing about Russian writers of the late nineteenth century was their willingness to address, directly, the hardest questions of human life. That tradition was inherited by Russian choreographers. Nijinsky in ‘The Rite of Spring’; his sister, Bronislava Nijinska, in ‘Les Noces’; Balanchine in most of what he did—at times, you almost turn away from what they’re saying. It’s too much. With Alexei Ratmansky, you don’t have to turn away, or not yet, but the instinct is the same. Unlike most ballet choreographers working in this country right now, he takes on the great themes—love, grief, marriage, death—and looks them straight in the face.”
“Phantom” Sets Up Shop In Vegas
Other Broadway musicals might be finding Las Vegas a tough town, but “Phantom” has opened in a lavish production. “It reportedly cost $75m to stage, including $40m to create a replica of the Paris Opera house inside the Venetian hotel.”
Simon Schama – Uncommon Storyteller
“Does your typical academic write best-selling 900-page histories of the French Revolution that deliberately omit footnotes? Produce texts mixing scholarship with fiction, to the point where you cannot tell the two apart? Dash off art criticism for magazines like the New Yorker? Teach seditious graduate seminars on Writing History Beyond the Academy”?
Ross: Barenboim The Traditionalist
Daniel Barenboim leaves the directorship of the Chicago Symphony. Alex Ross likes what the orchestra has accomplished under a conductor he had some questions about ten years ago. “Ultimately, Barenboim is a fiery traditionalist, who can revitalize the most familiar scores.”
How The New York Review Of Books Came Into The World
“When The New York Review of Books made its début–Volume 1, No. 1, dated February 1, 1963, appeared in the midst of a four-month-long printers’ strike at the Times–the idea for an intellectually vigorous books magazine was so perfectly cooked, and its founding editors, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, so skilled and connected, that an extended family of friends and sympathizers rushed to fill the chairs at a vast table of contents.”
Group Protests Loss Of Texas Classical Music Station
Texas classical radio station KTPB has been sold to a Christian broadcaster. So classical music will go off the air, but not without a fight. “Just because we live out here in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean we have to be a cultural void. This radio station has reached people who have no other access to the arts. Meanwhile, three other Christian music stations lie just to the north on the FM dial.”