The company has made an agreement with musicians that will provide live orchestral accompaniment for the dance company’s first three productions in the upcoming season. “Last season, a decision to eliminate live accompaniment for performances of “Cinderella” resulted in an increased commitment by both sides to avoid such cut-backs in the future.”
Tag: 08.25.06
Architecture Prize Or Game Show Contest?
There are six buildings competing for this year’s Stirling Prize for architecture. “Today, the prize is as much a live TV show on the big night, staged against the backdrop of a black-tie dinner with wine and all the trimmings at a top celebrity venue, as it is a judgment on the state of contemporary British architecture.”
Free Books, Read Aloud
A number of new collectives are recording public-domain books and releasing them on the internet. “At its worst a free audiobook can sound like a teenager reading aloud in high school English class. At its best it can offer excellent sound quality and skilled narration infused with a passion for the text. In between is a world of competent readings, sometimes spiced with affected accents, mumbled words and distant car horns and reflecting all manner of literary interpretations.”
Trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, 78
“He pleased far more crowds than critics. John S. Wilson, reviewing Mr. Ferguson’s big band at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival for The New York Times, called it ‘screaming’ and ‘strident.’ Yet that same year the readers of Down Beat magazine voted the band the world’s second-best, outranked only by Count Basie’s.”
How Digital Prints Change Photography
New digital prints of Walker Evans photographs raise some artistic issues. “A new detail revealed by an enlarged digital print becomes a visual fact that, however subtly, affects the balance of the entire picture. Photography is a seamless medium: a whole, continuous image put together at once, which the eye unconsciously distinguishes from a drawn image that is made inch by inch, or pixel by pixel, in the case of a digital image.”