Ever since 1996, when Sydney and Melbourne companies were merged to form the Sydney-based Opera Australia, Melburnian opera fans have complained that the national company gives their city too few performances of too few works with too few top-tier singers. New OA artistic director Lyndon Terracini plans to address their complaints, with more new productions, including a Ring cycle to start in 2012.
Tag: 11.10.09
Publisher Cut Gay Storyline From From Here To Eternity
Kaylie Jones, daughter of author James Jones: “My father agreed to eliminate a certain number of F-words – in part because there was a question whether the US postal system would even deliver the book to stores because of its ‘salacious’ nature – but there was another battle he was waging with his publisher. Apparently Scribner’s had a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy about depicting homosexuality in the Army.”
Marsalis Can’t Seem To Finish His Blues Symphony
The world premiere of the piece, by the Atlanta Symphony, was first planned for summer 2008 and has just been postponed for the third time. Marsalis “keeps missing his deadline. Two of the planned seven movements are completed and playable. Two more are in rough draft form. The rest is still in Marsalis’ head.”
Mark Ravenhill Gripes About Being Bypassed For Newbie Playwrights
“Shopping and F***ing playwright Mark Ravenhill has criticised the theatre industry for placing too much emphasis on producing the work of first-time writers, claiming more time should be spent developing ‘long-term’ relationships with talent.”
Linden MacIntyre Wins Canada’s $50K Giller Prize
“Mr. MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man chronicles the emerging crisis of conscience in a worldly priest who has been assigned to keep a lid on church-related sex scandals that are destroying the lives of the faithful in rural Cape Breton.”
In Gaza, A Women’s Film Festival Challenges Hamas
“Through The Eyes of Women, the three-day program that started Tuesday, includes 27 films, all by female directors, five of whom are from Gaza. Most of the rest hail from other Arab states, with eight from the West Bank.”
When Fine Art Objects Live In Federal Agencies
“This is the essential difference between curating a collection at a museum and one at a federal agency: These are working buildings where staff and visitors … use the furniture, walk on the rugs, sleep in the four-poster beds, drink from the tea cups, write at the desk and, sometimes, break the chair when they lean back too far.”
Kindle Unfriendly To Visually Impaired, Universities Say
“The National Federation of the Blind planned to announce Wednesday that the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University won’t consider big rollouts of the electronic reading device unless Amazon makes it more accessible to visually impaired students.”
Venice Architecture Biennale Names First Female Director
Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima “has won acclaim for recent projects including the new Bowery home for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and this summer’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London.”
A Fine Swine: New Horizons In Porcine Intelligence
Domestic pigs have shown that they understand mirrors and can use them to find hidden food. They “are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest.” Not to mention that they can roll out rugs, herd sheep (Babe was not an anomaly), and play videogames with joysticks.