Tag: 09.24.06

Looking For Space In Chicago

Chicago is unquestionably a great theatre town. But is America’s Second City suffering from an undersupply of good downtown venues? “With Friday’s announcement that the Broadway hit Jersey Boys is arriving in Chicago a year from now — with no particular need or inclination to leave — this is hardly the stuff of fantasy. It’s more the stuff of an impending logjam.”

The Most Underrated Famous Architects In The World

“It takes a certain chutzpah to argue that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is underrated. The firm is, after all, a colossus of world architecture with well over 10,000 projects to its credit, including several of the most iconic modernist buildings of the 20th century… But none of this quite dispels the sense that when the story of American architecture’s development is told, SOM, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, gets short shrift.”

Better Shakespeare Through Arguing

Shakespeare productions in recent decades have tended to draw attention to their staging, their avant-garde settings, even their unconventional costuming. But a new book attempts to delve deeper into what has always made Shakespeare great: his use of language. The author’s aim is to “bring to the reader a lot of what I find to be incredibly exciting controversies over how to speak Shakespeare, how to play Shakespeare, how to listen to Shakespeare, how to watch Shakespeare. Controversies that have scholars at each other’s throats, that have directors and actors pounding the table.”

Forget The Kids, Bring On The Good Stuff!

Animation is serious business in most countries, and while America has no shortage of talented animators, the genre is being held hostage by Hollywood’s insatiable desire to market anything animated to children, says Ty Burr. “Aside from the stray burst of maverick inspiration — Tim Burton’s stop-motion Corpse Bride or Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly — most alternative animation comes from overseas, where grown-up audiences have always been less uptight about the form.”

Inconsistent? Yes. Enigmatic? Sure. Worth The Trouble? Absolutely.

Christoph Eschenbach has come in for no small amount of criticism since taking the reins of the Philadelphia Orchestra. But David Patrick Stearns says that there’s no question that the maestro has earned an extension of his tenure. “He has made Philadelphia an island of European musical life in the best possible way… On good nights, Eschenbach isn’t just exciting – he goes to the heart of every phrase with a conviction and specificity that few others match.”

A Failed Experiment

Peter Dobrin respects Eschenbach’s musical skills, but says that the partnership with a notoriously difficult orchestra in Philadelphia just isn’t working out. “Eschenbach may have done wonders for the orchestra’s endowment, but he’s not creating a new sound for the ensemble, or even successfully layering his erratic interpretive thoughts on the orchestra’s vaunted plushness. No, what counts as success these days is Eschenbach and the orchestra reaching the last measure of a piece without getting lost along the way.”

Recycled Safety Trumps Original Design

Nashville’s new Schermerhorn Symphony Center has received plenty of raves since opening two weeks ago. But not everyone loves the design: “The symphony’s leaders could have chosen to make a bold statement about the present and future of classical music in their city, as orchestras in Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia have done in recent years by commissioning Frank Gehry, Cesar Pelli and Rafael Vinoly, respectively. Instead they turned to David Schwarz, a capable architect but hardly a visionary, who has delivered exactly what was ordered: a custom-made amalgam of recycled architectural elements from the past, most connected only tenuously to Nashville.”

A Revolution Vindicated

Composer Steve Reich turns 70 next month, and he has never been more in demand as a musical figurehead. “Reich may be an acclaimed cultural figure now, but at the beginning he was a revolutionary… He happily reclaimed the harmonies that the Western world had found sufficient for centuries; indeed, he looked back further to medieval music, as well as to Hebrew chant, and Balinese and African percussion traditions… And this was so controversial that, during the first 10 years of his ensemble, most of the performances of Reich’s music were in art galleries and museums, not concert halls.”