Tag: 07.16.06

Assessing Year One Of The Robertson Era

David Robertson’s first year as music director of the St. Louis Symphony has been, in musical terms, an unqualified success. Robertson’s programming was innovative, his concerts well-received, and critics noted a sharp uptick in the orchestra’s playing. But ticket sales slumped badly for the SLSO this year, a possible after-effect of a musicians’ strike in 2005, and the organization is still struggling to find a way to make itself relevant and appealing to a broader audience.

Conductor And Miami Symphony Founder Manuel Ochoa, 80

“Against all odds, or more vividly as it’s said in Spanish, contra viento y marea (against the wind and the tide), Ochoa kept a professional symphony orchestra going in our area when other, more ambitious ensembles had failed. And he did it, not out of personal ambition, but, as Miami Symphony board of directors chairman Rafael Díaz-Balart says, ‘because he wanted to give something back to the community that had given him so much’.”

Are Writers’ Estates Ruining Innovation?

“The oddity of the general intransigence of the posthumous representatives of Brecht and Beckett has always been that both dramatists were radicals who overturned theatrical convention. Yet subsequently their executors have sought to seal these free-thinking pieces in an artistic formaldehyde at least as strong as the conservatism that the authors originally stripped away.”

Acosta: Dealing With The Color Barrier

“The first black principal of the Royal Ballet, Carlos Acosta was adamant about not being typecast. He has been a pioneer in the extension of colour-blind casting from opera to classical ballet. ‘The fact that I’m the first black Romeo – and I make people forget it – is a big achievement,’ he says. ‘If they’d judged me for my looks, and put me in a box, the world would never have seen the Romeo that lies beneath me … In New York there are black dancers and their aspirations are constantly killed.’ Yet in his view, recruitment of black people into classical ballet, as opposed to contemporary dance, remains a problem.”

Why Aren’t Books And Culture On American TV Or Radio?

“In America, when people advocate gutting government support of PBS and NPR, which Congress tried again this year despite President Bush’s mild opposition, they often cite cable TV and talk radio as the marketplace’s answers to any audience needs. That’s hardly the case when one considers what laughably passes for books-and-arts coverage on cable or talk radio. I’ve detected no such programming on commercial radio, except when another culture-war distraction flares up. And there’s precious little on cable.”

Is There Any Other Theatre Like Chicago’s Steppenwolf?

“Most regional theaters would have hesitated to produce a single one of the works in the current Steppenwolf season (which can now be viewed as a whole). Steppenwolf willingly took seven doses of box office poison in the name of its art. Back to back. Especially because it took an inevitable and fiscally sobering toll on subscription levels, it’s an accomplishment worthy of note and admiration. But the anniversary season also reveals something about how much this theater has changed under artistic director Martha Lavey.”

A Grand Plan To Reconsider Shostakovich

“Valery Gergiev, the director of the Mariinsky (formerly Kirov) Theatre, has come up with a grand plan to rebut these fatuities, commanding, on the centenary of the composer’s birth, a fabulous spread of Shostakovich’s work to be set before the world’s cities. All 15 Shostakovich symphonies are being performed, under Gergiev’s own baton (at the Barbican), along with all his less well known operas and ballets, in a celebration that the conductor hopes will convince the world to see the composer differently.”

Jewel In The Bolshoi Crown

Svetlana Zakharova is the Bolshoi Ballet’s reigning star. “In the flesh, it’s hard not to be a little dazzled by Zakharova’s improbably fine features and impossibly big blue eyes – but these are merely the finishing touches of a long, strong, beautifully proportioned body that’s one of the great balletic instruments of our times. On stage, such is her athleticism and purity of line, that one doubts she has ever found anything difficult. Is this true?”