“In the first half of his long, spectacularly eventful life, he played jazz with Bix Beiderbecke and Mozart with Leonard Bernstein; married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner; made a movie with Fred Astaire; and was interrogated about his left-wing ties by Joe McCarthy. Then, at the age of 44, he stopped playing music and started writing fiction, eventually producing a monstrously long autobiographical novel called ‘The Education of Albie Snow’.”
Tag: 10.07.04
Yet Another NYC-Boston Rivalry
Days after he debuts in Boston, James Levine will travel back to New York to put his new toy on display at Carnegie Hall, where comparisons between the quality of the BSO and the Met Opera Orchestra are sure to be made by the sharp-tongued Big Apple critics. Over the course of the season, Levine will conduct six Carnegie concerts: three with the Met, and three with Boston. It’s almost as if the same guy is managing the Yankees and the Red Sox, and for classical music fans in the Northeast, it should be an interesting matchup.
Desperately Seeking Playwrights
The UK’s largest theater companies are openly soliciting the younger generation of playwrights to write the next generation of great British plays. “We are, it seems, witnessing a shift in the theatre culture, an explosion of energy not witnessed since the emergence of Joe Penhall, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Conor McPherson et al through the Royal Court a decade ago. That energy has, however, long since dissipated,” and the best young writers tend to be found working in the television world, making for a work experience which doesn’t necessarily translate well to the stage.
Bringing Radio Up To Date
While digital radio has made nothing so visible as a dent in the American broadcast landscape, the UK is predicting that 13 million digital sets will be sold there by 2008, and the new technology is expected to all but replace analog radio broadcasting within a decade. The government is considering setting a “switch-off date” for the analog broadcasts, as most Western governments have done for TV signals, in an effort to speed the transition.
Whatever Happened To The Two-Shot?
The rules that the Bush and Kerry campaigns attempted to impose on news networks covering their debates may have made for a good laugh at the politicians’ expense, but David Thomson says that the participants’ aversion to reaction shots can be lumped in with the movie and television industry’s move away from “two-shots” and other camera angles designed to emphasize the space around individuals. These days, it seems like close-ups are the only thing anyone cares about. “There was once a set of theories on film direction, or mise en scène, that attested to the aesthetics and the ethics of using spatial relationships in movies.”
How To Run A Concert Venue: Don’t Rely On Ticket Sales
St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which is the main home to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the secondary concert site of the Minnesota Orchestra, has balanced its books for the second year running, after years of red ink. “The Ordway embarked on an austerity program and stepped up its fund-raising efforts for the 2002-’03 fiscal year, raising $3.6 million. The theater nearly matched that figure this year… as the Ordway seeks to decrease its dependence on box office revenues.”
Following The Leader
The UK’s music industry trade group is preparing to file lawsuits against 28 illegal file-traders, in a mimic of the anti-piracy tactic that has been used effectively by industry groups in Europe and the US. The European group will soon be suing a new group of nearly 500 file-swappers; the US recording companies have sued nearly 6,000.
Nobel Winner Known For Reinventing Dialogue
Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek is an artist of many varying stripes, and it may have been that self-contained diversity that attracted the Nobel Academy to her in the first place. “In her dramatic works, the academy noted, Ms. Jelinek ‘successively abandoned traditional dialogues for a kind of polyphonic monologues that do not serve to delineate roles but to permit voices from various levels of the psyche and history to be heard simultaneously.’ She may be the first Nobel laureate in literature to have made a significant commitment to the Internet, frequently posting commentary on her own web site.”
Induce Act To Make Progress, Talks Don’t
“After four days of painstaking negotiations, technology and consumer groups said they have failed to reach a consensus with the entertainment industry on the language of the Induce Act, a proposed bill making it illegal to encourage copyright infringement.”
Homer Tops A Best-Seller List (Thank You, Brad Pitt)
“The ancient Greek Homer remains one of today’s most popular poets, topping the chart of bestselling poetry books for 2004 with online retailer Amazon. Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, which both dealt with the Trojan War, were the first and second bestsellers. His popularity has been partly put down to release of the movie Troy, starring Brad Pitt, which is based on The Iliad.”