When the Austin Symphony took to the stage Friday night for its schedules concert, its conductor Peter Bay was conspicuously absent. “The mystery of the missing conductor deepened when the principal horn player, Tom Hale, bounded onto the stage, bowed and then rose to the podium. The principal horn player?” So what delayed Bay? The orchestra certainly didn’t tell the audience…
Tag: 11.20.05
South Florida Gets A New Orchestra
It’s in Boca Raton. “Those leading the new chamber orchestra are proceeding along a very cautious, slow-growth path, determined to avoid setting an overly ambitious agenda or digging a financial crater. With a modest annual budget of $365,000, the Symphonia is committed to being revenue-driven.”
Man Has Beethoven’s Bones
A California man says he’s in possession of fragments of Beethoven’s bones. “Paul Kaufmann made the announcement at the Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, which helped coordinate forensic testing aimed at authenticating the fragments and determining what killed Beethoven at age 56.”
Movielink To Deliver Hundreds Of Movies Online
Movielink signs up Fox to make available hundreds of movies online. “Movielink was formed several years ago as a joint venture of five Hollywood studios to provide a legal alternative for consumers who want to download movies to personal computers. The studios are concerned that sites offering illegally copied movies will diminish their revenues. But the studios also see the Internet as a lucrative, future way to reach customers directly. Film downloading, unlike music, has been slow to develop as few homes had the high-speed Web connections needed to quickly get movies.”
‘Phantom’ To Break Longest-Running Record
On January 9, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” will become the longest running show in Broadway history. “The performance will be number 7,486 — surpassing the current champion Cats, which held at 7,485 shows and was also written by Webber.”
‘Rent’ – From Stage To Screen
Taking the Broadway hit to the screen is a tricky thing. “Rent is the eighth-longest-running show in Broadway history, and since 1996 has grossed $460 million from its various North American productions. And Rentheads attending early film screenings are having a go at the movie online, parsing all 2 hours 10 minutes of it, song by song by song.”
Remaking The Video Experience
It will still be a while before video on demand makes it possible to see whatever you want whenever you want it. “With the rise of portable video devices, viewers are starting to change the way they watch television. The networks, meanwhile, don’t want to be left behind. In many ways, TV is where the music industry was five years ago when Napster came on the scene. Having the benefit of those lessons in how to lose the revenues and the attention of a fan base, television networks are seeking renumerative new ways to distribute their programs.”
The Audubon Tragedy Enters Its Final Act
There may never have been a more tragic or bizarre breakup in the classical music world than that of the Audubon Quartet. Six years ago, three members of the Roanoke, Virginia-based group fired their first violinist, David Ehrlich, who promptly sued to prevent the quartet from continuing to perform without him. Since then, recriminations and lawsuits have flown unabated, bitterly dividing Roanoke’s musical community and making several attorneys very rich. The courts have sided mainly with Ehrlich, and this month, two members of the quartet will be forced to surrender their home, their possessions, and – no kidding – the instruments with which they make their living, to pay the $611,000 court award to Ehrlich.
Finding Comedy At Its Source
Does your birthplace have anything to do with how funny you are? It would seem unlikely at first blush, but haven’t we all had the experience of meeting people from an area totally unlike our own, and being stunned at their lack of humor? The Guardian has quantified the phenomenon (albeit in an almost totally unscientific manner) and mapped the most and least humorous places in Great Britain. London, not surprisingly, comes out looking pretty funny, as do Glasgow and Wales. Birmingham, it turns out, is quite unfunny, and something called East Anglia is apparently brutally somber.
Warhol, Pollock Stolen From Scranton Museum
“Two pieces – Andy Warhol’s silk-screen print ‘Le Grande Passion’ and a painting by abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock titled ‘Springs Winter’ – were taken from the Everhart Museum’s main gallery at about 2:30 a.m., a museum spokesman said. Scranton police were notified minutes after the thieves tripped the museum’s motion sensors. The thieves appeared to have been aided by a large tent covering the museum’s back entrance for an event.”