So what’s it like to audition for a job with one of the world’s great symphony orchestras? In a word, terrifying. The process involves multiple rounds of competition, with candidates performing the most difficult excerpts of the orchestral repertoire one after another, before a committee hidden behind a screen. One slip-up, one wrong note, one skipping bowstroke, and the months of preparation and hundreds of dollars in travel expenses can all be for nought.
Tag: 11.23.03
When Personal Taste Trumps Objectivity
Richard Dyer is intrigued by John Rockwell’s recent analysis of two prominent pianists with distinctive styles, one of whom Rockwell adores, and the other of whom drives him up the wall. “Many of the greatest artists overturn convention and provoke controversy; most of us would rather hear a risk-taker than someone who’s playing it safe.” Still, the unique qualities that make a performer worth hearing are the same ones that will cause many members of a given audience to turn up their noses at a performance that sounds substantially different from what they’re used to hearing. Dyer: “All of us have artists whose work we enjoy; all of us have encountered performers who fail to leave us begging for more. But every listener has to be open to surprise.”
Budget Woes For Boston’s Wang
When Boston’s Wang Center announced last month that it was severing ties with the perpetually strapped Boston Ballet, and that it would replace the company’s Nutcracker performances with a touring Rockettes show next season, it was seen as a severe blow to the ballet company. But upon closer inspection, it may be the Wang Center which is in the more serious fiscal hole: “It has steadily been beaten out for marquee productions by for-profit Broadway in Boston, a division of Clear Channel Entertainment… And the Wang’s attempts to invest in productions such as last month’s Thoroughly Modern Millie have so far resulted in losses.”
How Much Should Competence Cost?
“Josiah Spaulding Jr., the president of the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, isn’t just well paid. He’s among the highest-paid leaders of a nonprofit performing arts center in the country, earning more than the directors of a range of institutions that, budgetwise, dwarf the Wang Center. Spaulding’s compensation package for the fiscal year ending in May 2002, the most recent available, was $536,159 a year. This figure was the first thing a group of nonprofit experts noticed when they were asked to review the Wang Center’s Internal Revenue Service filings.”
Why European Conductors Prefer European Orchestras
Josh Kosman ponders why conductors such as Simon Rattle prefer to lead European orchestras than American bands. “The crucial distinction is that American audiences still need to be sold – constantly, repeatedly, and with tireless effectiveness – on the very premise of orchestral music. No conductor of an American orchestra, not even in the bastions of old-world Europhilia along the East Coast, can ever entirely take for granted the importance of what he’s doing. For many music directors, especially the Europeans who still constitute nearly the entire conductorial population of the United States, that uncertainty can rankle.”
Twyla Tharp – Beyond Dance
“In the last 35 years, Twyla Tharp has created 126 dances, choreographed 5 movies (including Milos Forman’s “Hair” and “Amadeus”), won two Emmys for her television special “Baryshnikov by Tharp,” written an autobiography, worked on four Broadway shows and, this year, won a Tony for “Movin’ Out,” a narrative ballet set to Billy Joel’s music. Now she has completed her second book, “The Creative Habit.” And she wants to be very clear that it is not about dance.
Sing-along Software
New software can make anyone sound like a (good) singer. “The software, which is due to be released to consumers in January, allows users to cast their own (or anyone else’s) songs in a disembodied but exceedingly life-like concert-quality voice. Just as a synthesizer might be programmed to play a series of notes like a violin one time and then like a tuba the next, a computer equipped with Vocaloid will be able to “sing” whatever combination of notes and words a user feeds it. The first generation of the software will be available for $200. But its arrival raises the prospect of a time when anyone with a laptop will be able to repurpose any singer’s voice or even bring long-gone virtuosos back to life.”
Dale Peck: Extreme Book Reviewing
Dale Peck is a human hatchet disguised as a literary critic. He’s unequivocal: “Novels and memoirs are on a wrong course. They are either inward-gazing, solipsistic and impotent or unconscious and rarefied, written by recidivist realists who pretend the twentieth century didn’t happen.” And America’s other book critics? “They are back-scratchers, afraid for their own careers – novelists reviewing their friends’ works. It is very dishonest.”
The Atheneum’s New Plan
Is Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum $120 million expansion still on track? Museum officials aren’t saying for sure. “One can understand why some people at the museum have been a little testy the past year. You would be cranky, too, if you had lost one museum director, one board president, and five trustees in a matter of weeks because of conflicts over the direction of the capital-endowment drive.”