The newly minted director of the Edinburgh International Festival has threatened to quit the post or severely scale back the scope of the massive event if funding is not increased. “The International Festival — one of several held in Edinburgh during August — receives £4 million of public money, but its programme costs this year are more than £8 million, and it has a deficit of £500,000.”
Tag: 08.06.05
Farewell To The Lindsays
“After 40 years, the Lindsays, the most successful British string quartet of their generation, have given their final concert…”
UK – A Challenge To The Design Establishment?
Richard Rogers and Norman Foster have dominated English architecture for the past decade. But “as London embarks on eight years of major regeneration to transform the city’s East End and the Thames Gateway, an impassioned debate has begun about the practices and philosophies that should shape a new era. Amid the steadily increasing clamour of building and hype, the two lords’ hold on British architecture is under challenge.”
Gergiev: Rebuilding Russian Music
Conductor Valery Gergiev is on a mission. “When I meet [Putin] I tell him, ‘Do we have a chance to improve dramatically the situation of the provincial orchestras in Russia?’ ” He asks ‘What is the situation?’, and I tell him we lost, in the 1980s and 1990s especially, many great teachers, many great musicians, not only famous ones but also . . . thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of professional musicians.”
Wireless Broadband – Just Basic Civic Infrastructure
Two remote rural counties in Oregon offer free wireless broadband internet service for everyone. “Broadband is just the next step in expanding the national infrastructure, comparable to the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and rural electrification. Indeed, we need to envision broadband Internet access as just another utility, like electricity or water. Often the best way to provide that will be to blanket a region with Wi-Fi coverage to create wireless computer networks, rather than running D.S.L., cable or fiber-optic lines to every home.”
What Is It About Perlman?
What is it about Itzhak Perlman that inspires such devoted fans, asks Peter Dobrin. Surely not his music-making alone. “A blindfold test in the first movement would have revealed an often-dull player with moments of difficulty with intonation. I’m not saying that in total the Perlman experience was a bad one, or even that his shortcomings outweighed his assets. But would a fresh-faced recent Juilliard School graduate have gotten the same response from this audience with exactly the same performance? Hardly. It’s a point worth considering if only because perpetuation of the art form will require cultivating love for the next one or two Itzhak Perlmans – or dozen.”