One day after unionized staff narrowly voted to reject cost-cutting measures to reduce debt of €25 million, the board of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, which operates the popular summer festival, voted unanimously to ask the national culture minister to shut the organization down. Verona’s mayor claims that this action won’t affect the actual performances this summer, though a new, privatized entity will have to run the festival. (in Italian; Google Translate version here)
Philadelphia Orchestra Launches New Social-Impact Programs
“The group is instituting [one new] program, increasing others, and packaging them under an umbrella acronym: HEAR, which stands for health, education, access, and research. … The initiatives are part of a changing institutional direction, [orchestra president Allison Vulgamore] said, taking the orchestra more heavily into social-mission work. ‘I want to be off stage as much as we are on stage.'”
U. Texas Student Found Murdered Was Promising Ballet Dancer
“The body of 18-year-old Haruka J. Weiser was found Tuesday in a creek in the heart the University of Texas campus, one day after her roommate reported her missing … She was in Austin on a full dance scholarship.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.07.16
George Goldner: Nothing If Not Opinionated–And Entertaining
It’s not quite The Car Guys, but an exchange at a recent symposium at the Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting* has tickled a couple of people I know … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-04-07
The Butterfly Art Project | Frygrond
This is the third essay in a series of four “We the Audience” posts designed to introduce my readers to the citizen artists working in some of South Africa’s most challenged areas. … read more
AJBlog: We The Audience Published 2016-04-07
Flesh and the Gaze
Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner’s Eskasizer, at The Boiler February 26 through April 3. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-04-07
Kudos Wayne Shorter, sole “jazz” Guggenheim fellow
Though the Guggenheim Foundation has in recent practice conferred several of its prestigious annual fellowships on musicians of jazz or beyond, only Wayne Shorter, the great 83 year old saxophonist-composer – an NEA Jazz Master, co-founder of Weather Report, … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2016-04-07
Record Store Day
Every day is a special day. That is not a random feel-good statement; it reflects the reality that most, if not all, days on the calendar are co-opted in the name of a cause, … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-04-07
Just one week away
My concert — my reemergence as a composer — is just one week away. April 14, 7:30 PM at the Mansion, the warm and intimate performance space at Strathmore, the big performing arts center … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-04-07
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Panama Papers Clarify Ownership Of A Modigliani That Had Been Stolen
A Paris art dealer’s estate wants the art-collecting Nahmad family to return Amadeo Modigliani’s Seated Man With A Cane, which it claims the Nazis seized in World War Two. Panama Papers documents show the family had hidden true ownership of the work.
Panama Papers: How A Financial Speculator Transformed The Art Market
“The files may finally lay to rest rumours about how Christie’s snatched the Ganz commission from under the noses of rival auction houses. It is also a masterclass in the art of hedging by one of the world’s most successful financial speculators.”
Every Night A Singer Destroys This Artist’s Painting (And A New One Has To Be Created)
“It took artist Gerard Gauci a week to paint the whimsical portraits of sopranos Meghan Lindsay and Peggy Kriha Dye, which grace the stage of the Elgin Theatre in Opera Atelier’s Lucio SillaLucio Silla. But it only takes one minute for them to be destroyed when enraged dictator Lucio Silla punches one painting and stabs the other.”
Shakespeare First Folio Discovered On Scottish Island
“Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University, said her first reaction on being told the stately home was claiming to have an original First Folio was: ‘Like hell they have.'”
So You’ve Just Won A Literary Prize And More Money Than You’ve Ever Had – How Do You Handle It?
“It’s great to receive a big wad of cash, of course, especially when you’re a writer with an erratic income trying to cobble together a living from part-time day jobs, intermittent advances, peripatetic teaching gigs and the occasional one-time grant. But unexpected sums bring unexpected burdens, both practical (What does this mean for my tax situation?) and psychological (Am I a fraud who does not deserve this money?)”
The Anti-Celebrity Of Great Pianists
“[He] turns out to have been a poor (and uninterested) self-promoter. … He never entered a major competition. He was uninterested in late Romantic concertos. … His book Piano Notes (2002) remained conspicuously silent about his own career. A mind of insatiable curiosity produced one of the greatest writers about music from any era. No surprise that his pianism was both misunderstood and undervalued.”
The Neglected Hodgepodge That Is Brussels (And Why It Doesn’t Work)
“Brussels, that magnificent repository of history, with its Renaissance guild houses and nineteenth-century palaces built on fortunes made in the Congo, is the capital of Belgium, but few Belgians take much pride in it, in the way the French are proud of Paris, or the British of London. To many Belgians, Brussels is a strange city of immigrants, refugees, and foreign grandees. It is still a capital in search of a nation. And if you include the EU, it is also a capital in search of an empire, or a federal state, or whatever it is that Europe is destined to become.”
Why Our Cities Need Public Squares
“The public square has always been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state. There were, strictly speaking, no public squares in ancient Egypt or India or Mesopotamia. There were courts outside temples and royal houses, and some wide processional streets.”