Tag: 12.09.03

Andrew Davis To Pittsburgh?

Is Chicago Lyric Opera director Andrew Davis shopping for a new job? “Last weekend, the 59-year-old Davis squeezed Friday night and Sunday afternoon performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony into a schedule that included conducting Wagner’s five-hour “Siegfried” in Chicago Saturday night. Pittsburgh’s music director, Mariss Jansons, will be leaving his post at the close of this season after seven years, and last week in an interview with a Pittsburgh newspaper before the concerts, Davis candidly admitted being interested in the position.”

David Lynch: $1 Billion For World Peace Center

Filmmaker David Lynch has “lent his famous name and idiosyncratic hairstyle to a project to raise $1 billion on behalf of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru of transcendental meditation who once entranced the Beatles, and who has for the past few decades been striving to build an earthly paradise. The $1 billion is for a meditation centre big enough to hold 8,000 skilled practitioners. Lynch explains that such a critical mass of positive thinking ‘broadcast’ from one spot will be enough to pacify the world.”

In Praise Of JM

JM Coetzee is the kind of author you can feel good about being enthusiastic, writes Lynne Coady. “This is an author whose work one can celebrate unreservedly, who refuses to be anyone’s public platypus, whose recent winning of the Nobel Prize for literature is the kind of thing that makes readers feel really, really good about whoever’s keeping shop over there in Stockholm, and really, really contemptuous toward the Man Booker Prize judges, who neglected to shortlist Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.”

Maryinsky Theatre Warehouse Damage More Extensive Than Reported

A September fire at the Maryinsky Theatre’s warehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia was said to have caused only $225,000 damage. But the cost is evidently much higher. Some 30 productions were affected by the fire, and it will take about $15 million to replace what was damaged. The company’s 2003-04 season are imperiled as well as tours to Germany, Japan and the United States.

Power(Point) To The People!

Former Talking Heads musician David Byrne has turned to PowerPoint as his latest artistic medium. “His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.”

Wright: Melbourne Theatre Stuck In The 19th Century

“According to Tom Wright, theatre in Melbourne has become stylistically mired in late-19th-century naturalism and has lost its intellectual edge. ‘There’s a discourse in Melbourne, mostly led by Adrian Martin, that takes cinema seriously and contextualises it as an art form. That’s exactly what’s lacking in theatre. No one’s providing a sense of historical perspective, and that makes it easy for theatre companies to develop a certain plodding sensibility where comfort becomes the major factor’.”

Former NYPhil Trustee Jumps To Lincoln Center

A major trustee of the New York Philharmonic, who left the board last month after opposing the orchestra’s proposed merger with Carnegie Hall, has joined the board of Lincoln Center. “While Rita Hauser has made donations to Lincoln Center and has served on its board as a representative of the Philharmonic, most of her financial support — millions of dollars — has gone to the orchestra during her 25 years on its board. She said yesterday that she might continue to support the Philharmonic but ‘not at the same level’.”