When Dudamel conducts an orchestra these days, he feels a ghost at his shoulder. The ghost belongs to his mentor, the Venezuelan conductor and educator José Antonio Abreu, who gave him both his musical training and his philosophy of life, and who had died just a few weeks earlier, in March, at age 78. “I lost Maestro physically,” Dudamel says, “but every time I do this” — he raises his hands as if he’s about to conduct — “a levare, to the orchestra, he’s there. He’s in the sound. I can hear him all of the time.”
Tag: 11.01.18
Keep Apu! One Indian-American Argues In Favor Of The Simpsons’ Controversial Character
“Apu has gotten a lot of flak lately for being racist depiction of Indian-Americans,” writes Bhaskar Sunkara (the founding editor of Jacobin, if you’re looking for leftist cred). “It would seem that the solution is to have every media depiction of an Indian guy in America be Kal Penn playing a doctor. But a lot of us pump gas too. A lot of us say things like ‘Thank you come again,’ because good service counts when you’re living on the razor edge of a society that doesn’t care about struggling people – wherever they’re originally from.”
Body-Shaming In Opera Business Is Very Real, Says Soprano Lisette Oropesa
“Back in 2005, the Cuban-American singer — sought by some of the world’s most prestigious opera houses — weighed 95 kilograms (210 pounds). Now, she weighs just 56 (123 pounds). … ‘I was told, ‘You need to fix the weight problem if you want to have any chance at all’,’ she said of an early experience at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.” And she did fix it: she started running marathons.
Houston’s Alley Theatre Hires New Artistic Director
Rob Melrose, who begins his tenure early next year, “is the founder of the Cutting Ball Theater, an experimental, avant-garde theater based in San Francisco. His hire comes at the end of a six-month search for a leader for Houston’s largest theater company. [Gregory] Boyd, who had led the Alley for 28 years, retired abruptly in January as the Houston Chronicle began investigating allegations that he had fostered an abusive working environment and had singled out female actors for harassment.”
Forger Couple Who Sold Hundreds Of Fake Monets, Matisses, Etc., Get 4-5 Years, €13 Million Fine
“A district court in Helsinki determined that the married couple at the center of the allegations, gallery owners Kati Marjatta Karkkiainen and Reijo Pollari, duped private collectors and auction houses into paying millions of dollars for paintings purportedly by blue-chip modernists and Impressionists such as Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Wassily Kandinsky; lesser-known Russian romanticists; and works by the popular 19th-century Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt.”
Study: Micro-doses Of Psychedelics May Enhance Creativity
Participants in a small-scale study scored higher on two measures of creativity after swallowing a tiny serving of hallucinogenic truffles—about one-tenth of a recreational dose. The drug did not stimulate similar improvement in an intelligence test, suggesting that its effects may be limited to enhancing innovation.
Colleges Go On The Offensive To Recruit Humanities Students For Lagging Programs
To avoid further slippage in humanities majors, elite colleges and universities have resorted to an all-out campaign to persuade students that such degrees aren’t just tickets to jobs as bartenders and Starbucks baristas. Colleges are starting early with that push.
Boston Ballet Opens New Project For Female Choreographers
“[Artistic director Mikko] Nissinen [has] established the new ChoreograpHER Initiative. It begins Thursday and Friday with sold-out performances in the company’s BB@home series — a showcase hosted at Boston Ballet’s South End headquarters — that, for the first time, will feature six emerging women choreographers who are dancers within the company.”