“After a near-death experience and two years without a maestro, the Columbus Symphony has turned to a youthful French Canadian to help restore some lost luster.” The orchestra’s new music director is 36-year-old Jean-Marie Zeitouni.”
Tag: 10.06.10
Carrie‘s Revenge: A Revival of a Broadway’s Most Notorious Flop
“Off Broadway, the MCC Theater has acquired the rights to mount the first professional production of Carrie since it closed on Broadway in 1988, three days after opening to a pile of hide-under-the-covers reviews and setting a record by losing more than $7 million.” The original musical is being heavily revised, and (alas) the Pig Ballet has been cut.
James Joyce, Classical Music Maven
“[The] creator of some of the most iconoclastic and difficult works of 20th-century fiction was surprisingly conservative in his own musical tastes. Joyce liked opera – especially Bellini – and Elizabethan lute songs.” Conservative, except that he loved things like Antheil’s wild Ballet Méchanique …
Giller Prize Finalists – The Year Of The Small Press?
“The jurors plowed through 98 titles in total, coming up with a long list of 13 last month, from which they are set to consider five for the award ceremony in Toronto on Nov. 9. Only one title by a major publisher, David Bergen’s novel The Matter with Morris, a Phyllis Bruce/HarperCollins book, made the top five.”
Frankfurt Book Fair Opens As Booksters Jockey For Position In The New World Order
“Nearly 250,000 people are due there this week with an unprecedented mixture of fear and excitement. The reason is digital. E-books have hardly forced us to find some other use for our shelves, yet this was the year the big beasts of the book and internet world decided they were the future.”
Brooklyn High School Named After Edward R. Murrow Ditches Its TV Program
“Television production never, in fact, merited a stand-alone department at Murrow, but for more than a generation of students who took the sequence of courses called TERM, or Television at Edward R. Murrow, to train for television careers, it might have seemed like one.”
The Blockbuster Show That Proved A Spectacular Bust
It was this summer’s feature at the Art Gallery of Ontario. “The costly show, including works from the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre in Paris, had been expected to draw crowds to The Grange from mid-June until late September. It didn’t The upshot: Not just a huge revenue shortfall but an alarmingly low attendance figure for the first six months of the current fiscal year.”
Some Trouble With Quality In The 500-Channel Universe
“Somewhere along the way, standards seem to have been not so much lowered as eliminated. “Content” has replaced that archaic term “substance” and seems to promise much less. Style, in many cases, is content; that’s not even really news anymore. The bar has been lowered so many times that it now just lies there on the floor, lifeless and limp, the outmoded relic of other eras.”
The World’s Largest Book?
It’s 2 meters by 3 meters big. Yours for a cool 100,000 dollars, Australian publisher Gordon Cheers said that the last book even close in size to his 128-page volume was the Klencke Atlas, produced in 1660 as a gift for Charles II of England.
Forget E-Books. Are You Ready For “Enhanced” E-books?
“Talk of the ‘ebook’ that has dominated the Frankfurt Book Fair in recent years has given way in 2010 to excited chatter about the so-called ‘enhanced ebook’, a mixture of the traditional book, audio, video and game.”