Opera Cleveland Starts Over

So Opera Cleveland is off to a fresh start. “Hmm. Haven’t we been here before? A year ago, Opera Cleveland was preparing for its first season with an artistic director, Leon Major, and principal con ductor, Richard Buckley, who were eager to cultivate the new company, a merger between Cleveland Opera and Lyric Opera Cleveland.”

How Are Private Art Collections “National Treasures”?

“Pictures, over the decades, have been earmarked by the government as ‘national treasures’, which are not to be given export licences. My republican gorge rises. How are Van Dycks, owned by the earls of Pembroke, part of anyone’s heritage (unless your name is Herbert, of course)? “We”, the nation, can see the pictures, at Wilton House for £12 a head (or, touchingly noblesse oblige, free on September 7 this year). But that doesn’t make them ours.”

Lessons To Be Learned From The Kids From Caracas

Venezuela’s youth orchestra wowed London this week. “Music that is too often dismissed as difficult and elitist is being recognised for its ability to transform damaged lives. This initiative needs to be extended across the rest of the UK. Instead, we see cuts in spending and depressingly little time devoted to collegiate music-making in most of our schools. This must change.”

Getty Research Institute Gets A New Director

He’s Thomas W. Gaehtgens. Over the years, the institute has evolved into an ever more complex organization that has broadened its collections, engaged in community outreach, collaborated with local institutions and provided services for the public as well as credentialed scholars. Many of the materials in the library are available to students and the public.”

Belarus Police Raid Theatre

“Police special forces stormed the performance of a play by an underground theatre group in Belarus on Wednesday and arrested 50 people. Political opponents and counterculture groups have been suppressed in the former Soviet republic of Belarus under the leadership of Alexander Lukashenko. The Free Theatre angered the regime this summer.”

Steampunk – Victorian Age Meets Computer

Steampunk has its roots in science fiction literature, where it describes a corner of the genre obsessed with Victoriana and the idea that the computer age evolved alongside the industrial. Steampunk stories, which started appearing with regularity in the 1980s, eschew clean and orderly visions of the future in favor of gas-lighted streets, steam engines belching toxic smoke, and dastardly villains inventing strange technologies.