“The Literature Prize, set up as a rival to the Man Booker, has secured a sponsor. The sponsor’s identity has not yet been announced, although the £40,000 prize will adopt the sponsor’s name when it is revealed in February 2013.”
Tag: 12.11.12
Catcalls Stop The Opera At Paris Médée
“Audiences fed up with a radical director’s take on an opera usually save their rage till the final curtain calls. Monday night at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, in the first of four performances of Cherubini’s Médée, the audience couldn’t wait and interrupted the performance. There are limits, it would seem, on just how far a director can go, and for many those limits were breached.”
Galina Vishnevskaya, 86, Soviet Opera Star And Dissident Heroine
She spent two decades as the Bolshoi’s prima donna assoluta and the USSR’s most venerated classical singer – until she and husband Mstislav Rostropovich were blacklisted for having sheltered dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They emigrated to the US in 1974, as famous Cold War icons as well as renowned artists.
Zurich Has Misplaced 15% Of Its Art Collection
“Switzerland’s largest city Zurich acknowledged Monday it had lost trace of 5,176 works of art, including an original painting by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. The city had carried out its first full inventory of its vast collection of 35,000 pieces in nearly a century, only to discover that nearly 15 percent were missing, including nearly 1,400 original works.”
Finalists Named For First $100K Kennedy Playwriting Prize
“Two recent Off Broadway plays and two works produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival are among the five finalists for the new $100,000 theater award established to honor Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his interest in American history.”
Surprise! Generations Y And Z Still Prefer To Read Their News
“Publishers be warned: For all the attention given to *rich multi-media experiences* news-readers still enjoy reading the news the way their great-grandparents did: In columns of paragraphs.”
British Choreography’s Next ‘It Boy’
“The choreographic whizz kid Liam Scarlett, 26, has just landed the newest job [at the Royal Ballet]: artist-in-residence, a post created especially for him. … For several years, the wide-eyed, tousle-haired dancer – he looks a little like Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins – has been increasingly recognised as the ‘great white hope’ of British choreography.”
Deprived Twin Cities Orchestra Audiences Are Getting Restless
“Some subscribers [to the locked-out Minnesota Orchestra and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra] may be seeking their ‘classical fix’ elsewhere – a few classical groups have noticed a spike in ticket sales. Others are staying home and mourning the loss of a seasonal tradition.” Says one fan, “Not having the concerts, it’s stressing me out. I’m staying home, playing music and getting angry.”
A Skyscraper In Venice? By Pierre Cardin?
“His proposed Palais Lumière – a dizzying 60-story pirouette of glass and steel – represents either economic salvation for a faded corner of Venice or a grandiose fetish worthy of Dubai, depending on whom you ask.”
The State Of Digital Culture In Russia
“The current generation of Russians tasked with the activity of making culture and heritage more accessible by using digital technology have the unique privilege of starting from scratch. So the stereotypes from the Soviet era are no longer relevant. And in this moment of building something new, some elegant ideas are being developed and put into action.”