When Aubrey Bergauer arrived in 2014, the California Symphony was on the brink of financial collapse. Now, ticket sales have increased by 70 percent, concerts are frequently added to keep up with the demand, and the number of donors has nearly quadrupled. As orchestras around the country deal with aging audiences and search for ways to stay relevant—with midsize symphonies facing greater financial challenges than their big-city, big-donor counterparts—the California Symphony has succeeded by taking bold risks without compromising its musical integrity.” – Southwest Magazine
Tag: April 2019
A Generation Of Women Conductors Is Finally Breaking Glass Ceilings
In England, the US, and elsewhere, a big group of orchestras and opera houses is looking for music directors or chief conductors — and, for the first time, there’s a sizable group of female candidates being seriously considered, “not least, “writes Norman Lebrecht, “because the talent pool has finally exploded with candidates of outstanding communicative power.” – Standpoint
The Point Of Art? Not To “Save” Us (But It Can)
Christian Wiman: If there’s a poem that works for me, it’s showing me something of reality. It’s more than that, actually: it’s enabling me to participatein reality again. John Berger has a wonderful essay about looking at the paintings of Van Gogh when he’s in despair and saying that suddenly reality had been salvaged. That’s the word he uses. That’s often what I feel when I come across poetry that I love, that reality’s been salvaged for me. And reality does have to be salvaged for us, all of us, again and again. – New Criterion
When Culture Is At The End Of An Algorithm, We Lose The Juice Of Engaging With It
Christian Lorentzen: “The new books coverage is more like litter. Endless lists of recommendations blight the landscape with superlatives that are hard to believe, especially, as is inevitable, when they aren’t drawn from the work of critics but compiled by poorly paid writers who haven’t read the books they’re recommending, a standard practice in preview lists. Proliferating recommendations become what Elizabeth Hardwick called ‘a hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally.’ Readers are better served by the algorithm, which never pretends to have an actual opinion.” – Harper’s