“The most extreme landscape for the art form is found at City Ballet, where dozens of works, frustratingly underrehearsed, are performed each season. Yet by the very nature of the company’s George Balanchine-heavy repertory, there is often ample opportunity for individual dancers to shine. The company, no longer the one Balanchine envisioned, has turned into the punk rock of ballet. Performances are jittery, raw, unpredictable and, at times, horrific, but at both its unprofessional worst and unnervingly beautiful best, programs at the New York State Theater are alive. You go because you can’t fathom what will happen next.”
Tag: 10.14.05
One-Day Culture Strike In Italy To Protest Arts Funding Cuts
Italy’s public culture has shut down in a country-wide one-day strike. “Cinemas, theatres, concert halls and opera houses and even circuses in Italy will be empty today because of a combined strike and lockout in protest at huge cuts to the arts budget ordered by Silvio Berlusconi’s government. Impresarios and distributors are to join actors and musicians in the initiative. The draft budget for next year lops about a third off the main fund for the performing arts. Cultural institutions said they faced reductions of up to 40% in resources.”
Pinter – Power Playwright
“In his versatile and productive career, Harold Pinter, 75, has written plays and screenplays, directed theater productions, acted on screen and stage, and won awards across Europe. So precise and pared down is his prose, so artful his use of pauses and omissions to invoke discomfort, foreboding and miscommunication that he has his own adjective, Pinteresque, signifying a peculiar kind of atmospheric unease.”
New Energy in British Jazz
British jazz of the 1970s was vibrant, but by the 90s it had lost steam. “If there was an identity crisis in young British jazz just 10 years ago, it is now subsiding, and a lot of that is thanks to the work of F-ire. The measure of inspiration presented in the collective’s work reminds me of the very best of British jazz.”
Study: Classic FM Works
Critics assail the UK’s Classic FM as lightweight and useless in clutivating new audiences for classical music. But a new study reports that Classic FM is a potent audience-builder. “The study, conducted between May and October last year, compared concerts supported by Classic FM with those that were not. The Philharmonia Orchestra reported three times the number of first-time concert-goers at their Classic FM-supported events, and figures for the Barbican’s Classic-backed Mostly Mozart festival were even more impressive, with a massive 38 per cent of the audience attending a classical concert for the very first time.”
Stockhausen – Out Of This World?
Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has ha an enormous influence on contemporary music. Personally, he’s enigmatic: “This 77-year-old musical pioneer has claimed that he comes not from Burg Mödrath, near Cologne (listed as his birthplace on his biography), but rather from a planet orbiting the star Sirius, and that he was put on earth to give voice to a cosmic music that will change the world. He is, to put it mildly, a one-off.”
Pinter – No Respect At Home
Playwright Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize confirms his international stature as a great writer. “In Britain Pinter is ritually described as an ‘angry old man’. In the world at large he is seen as a great writer and champion of the oppressed. The gulf between the understanding and appreciation of Pinter at home and abroad is astonishing. Travel to virtually any country in the world and you will find a Pinter play in production.”
Bartoli – Diva Outside The Mainstream?
Cecilia Bartoli has made a specialty of singing repertoire off the beaten path. “She is not diva-ish in the old-fashioned sense – she doesn’t intimidate and, by all accounts, is an easy-going colleague when part of an opera cast. Her widely quoted falling out with Jonathan Miller at the Met in 1996 during a production of The Marriage of Figaro was untypical: in any case, she was standing up for a musical principle, not refusing a directorial command. She is tough, demanding, but no termagant. Yet there remain questions about the trajectory of her career…”
Booker Sponsor Under Investigation
The Booker Prize hasn’t had a good week. “Now comes news that that a division of the prize sponsors, the Man Group, is under investigation in the US by the Securities and Exchange Commission. After the collapse of the Philadelphia Alternative Asset Management hedge fund, its receiver has alleged that a senior employee at the Man Financial brokerage business – with whom PAAM worked – helped to hide $175m. of losses from investors.”