He spent 40 years (1964-2004) as music director of the Tokyo Symphony, assisted the young Seiji Ozawa at the Toronto Symphony in 1968-69, and served as music director of the Vancouver SO (1972-1985) and Syracuse SO (1985-1993), raising standards greatly at both orchestras. - Vancouver Sun (MSN)
Top-level lion dancing in China incorporates acrobatics and martial arts — and has traditionally excluded women from performing. But an 80-member lion-dancing troupe called Lingdong, in the city of Shantou, is one-quarter female; its coach intends to bring that to 50-50 and, eventually, to train an all-women group. - AFP (Yahoo!)
Edmond Dédé was born in 1827 to a free Black family of musicians in New Orleans. He settled and made his career in France. In 1887 in Bordeaux, he completed Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan, a full-fledged French grand opera which was never performed — until now. - Early Music America
The cost-benefit calculation is complicated and nuanced, requiring us to find a course between apocalyptic visions of civilizational decline and the naive utopianism of Silicon Valley. - LA Review of Books
The venue, designed by Chicago-based JDJ Architects, will be called the Checkout, a nod to the building’s former life as a 7-Eleven, and doubles as part of ACM’s hopes for the establishment. - Chicago Sun-Times
The paper, just published in the American Journal of Physics, derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass with 44 contributing authors. - Ars Technica
Othuke Ominiabohs started Masobe – which means “let us read” in the Isoko language – in 2018 with a $7,000 (£5,600) loan from his sister. In doing so, he joined a wave of new independent African publishers nurturing emerging African writers and getting fresh, exciting literature to African readers. - The Guardian
Sotheby’s auction sales were down 28 percent, to $4.6 billion, from $6.4 billion, but private sales were up 17 percent, climbing from $1.2 billion in 2023 to $1.4 billion. Christie’s, for its part, reported a 41-percent jump in private sales, to $1.5 billion—their highest level since 2020. - Artnet
"The organizers have said, essentially, that the event has gotten too big for Park City. When Sundance arrives every January, it balloons the ski town of 8,200 full-time residents into a snowy circus, with over 20,000 people streaming in from around the globe." - The New York Times
The decision, dramatically announced by Emmanuel Macron, to move the Mona Lisa to a special hygienically isolated gallery where les idiots who flock to take selfies in front of it won’t bother more cultured visitors who wish to study art in a hushed atmosphere, is a misguided act of snobbery. - The Guardian
President Emmanuel Macron’s vision to immortalize himself in glass? Replace some windows in the recently reopened Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The custodians of French architecture have responded with a resounding “non!” - The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
“People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a Van Gogh—but they’ve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at the Van Gogh Museum to sign off on it.” Doing so could prove to be a tall order. - The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
