Ontario’s Stratford Festival ended the year in the black, but saw its box office slip to 528,000. “The festival has yet to surpass the 600,000 attendance mark since 2003, a year that saw the SARS crisis, the blackout and the start of the war in Iraq.”
Tag: 12.11.06
Tenor Banned From La Scala
Robert Alagna will not be returning to La Scala, after the tenor walked off stage in the middle of a performance. “His behaviour has created a rift between the artist and the audience, and there is no possibility of repairing this relationship.”
Boston Museum Stuffed With Ideas
Boston’s Insitute for Contemporary Art is the first new Boston museum in 100 years. “Conceived as a machine for looking — and, at the same time, and loftily enough, as a place for thinking about the idea of looking — the building reflects the architects’ interest in exploring seemingly every intersection new museums have to steer through these days.”
Getty Agrees To Return Two Artifacts To Greece
“Culture Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis and museum director Michael Brand said they had ‘reached an agreement in principle on the return’ of a gold wreath and a marble bust. A formal agreement will be signed soon, they said in a joint announcement.”
Tenor Walks Out In Mid-Performance At La Scala
Tenor Robert Alagna walks off the stage at La Scala in the middle of a performance. In Alagna’s place, literally within the scene, entered tenor Antonello Palombi, not in costume, between the shouts coming from the loggione section of the theater. The shouts were, “For shame! For shame!”, and, “This is La Scala”! Opera Chic has extensive coverage of the incident.
LA Opera To Resurrect Nazi-Suppressed Music
Los Angeles Opera is launching a project to produce music that the Nazis tried to silence. The “Recovered Voices” project will highlight the music of early 20th-century composers such as Alexander Zemlinsky, Kurt Weill and Viktor Ullmann.
Dana Gioia Gets Another 4 Years At NEA
The U.S. Senate approved a second four-year term for the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts on Monday, and also confirmed President Bush’s nominees to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory panel for the NEA.
Getty Agrees To Return Funerary Wreath
“After nearly a year of negotiations, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has agreed in principle to return a rare fourth-century B.C. gold funerary wreath to Greece that cultural officials there contend was illegally removed from Greek soil, an expert briefed on the talks said today.”