The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia has tapped Belgian Dirk Brossé, 49, to succeed pianist/conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, its music director for the past 16 years. Solzhenitsyn is departing "a year before the end of his current contract," becoming conductor laureate next season, when Brossé begins his four-year contract....
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"The theater's creators and overseers, the Mayfair Community Development Corporation, announced over the weekend in letters to about 700 subscribers that a state budget cut left the agency with no money to create productions from scratch." It will go dark after its current production closes next month....
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Su Tong's "The Boat to Redemption," a novel about "a playboy Communist party official who castrates himself after he is banished to live on a river barge," has won the Man Asian literary prize," which "goes to an 'Asian' novel unpublished in English."...
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"Great views of Sydney Harbour from inside a stylish new foyer, better disabled access and more toilets are just some of the improvements transforming Australia's busiest building. The western side of the Opera House now has a colonnade and windows."...
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Three paragraphs after Sarah Palin begins her acknowledgments with a nod to herself, "[Lynn] Vincent's name is mentioned with several others. (At least she made it before the thanks to flight attendants, 'Big Dipper Construction' and 'everyone who values good customer service.')"...
ArtsJournal
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"As DVD sales decline, Hollywood studios are looking for ways to get movies straight to consumers' living rooms. This has some industry insiders worried that Hollywood is jeopardizing its most valuable asset: the theatrical release date. The movie industry is looking to change the way it distributes content."...
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"[B]eyond the entertainment value, there's growing evidence that listening to music can also help stimulate seemingly lost memories and even help restore some cognitive function." As neuroscientists begin to understand how that happens, "they are starting to work hand in hand with music therapists to develop new therapeutic programs."...
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"Scientists and curators have generally supported the laws passed in recent decades giving countries ownership of ancient 'cultural property' discovered within their borders. But these laws rest on a couple of highly debatable assumptions...."...
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"The only thing that could keep me alert through three hours of Brecht - however good the production - on a Monday evening is the fact that I could topple 20 feet if I nodded off. Theatre demands effort from the audience, and by God, the West End makes us work." But will audiences keep putting up with the toil the venues exact?...
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"Poligny residents' effort to preserve an old-fashioned Main Street bookstore may seem eccentric in an age of electronics, instantaneous communication and discount giants. But not in France, a country that is unusually fixated on its centuries-old traditions and is determined to safeguard its cultural heritage."...
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The appointment "is the culmination of a three-year artistic courtship between Mr. Feinstein and Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center." The singer and pianist will direct a new popular music series as "part of a larger plan to broaden programming."...
ArtsJournal
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"The event was called to order by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, banging a gavel to quell the applause that greeted her appearance, and then provoking laughter with her witty (and knowledgeable) observations about the links between opera and the legal profession, citing all the operas that have courtroom or jail scenes."...
ArtsJournal
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"'Glee,' which chronicles the lives of members of a high school glee club, is attracting between 7 and 8 million viewers every week, and doing well among the valued 18- to 49-year-old market segment. But it is something of an obsession among theater denizens, teenage and otherwise."...
ArtsJournal
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"Britain may remain in a recession that could still deepen, yet the mood in and out of the commercial theatre sector seems refreshingly upbeat." Of course, "there are also problems and worries, especially in a subsidised sector that accounts for almost all our new and cutting-edge drama."...
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"There have been at least six changes of national government in Italy since the [museum] was first announced in 1998, from left to centre to right, and the future of many such public projects has often seemed doubtful. But now here it stands ... almost exactly as [Zaha] Hadid and her team first imagined it."...
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A "former head of Paramount Motion Pictures certainly sounded like the right man to build a huge movie and TV studio in Massachusetts," but his $650 million plan for "14 sound stages and a virtual entertainment city in the woods of Plymouth" has been "marred by over-the-top claims, broken promises, legal infighting, and the chronic lack of one crucial ingredient: money."...
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"Sometime after moving to Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen decided to shake things up by placing the second violin section on the opposite side of the stage from the first violins, in what is known as European seating -- and it has stayed that way for the most part ever since." Then came Verdi's Requiem this month.......
ArtsJournal
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Broad will "create a $200-million endowment that would generate $12 million a year to operate the privately run, nonprofit institution. The only bigger single cash donation to the arts in Southern California history would be J. Paul Getty's initial $700-million 1976 bequest to establish the J. Paul Getty Trust -- $2.65 billion in today's dollars."...
ArtsJournal
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The sermonizing over the New Museum's upcoming show of a trustee's collection is a bit much, Jerry Saltz writes. "I like that the art world isn't regulated. I have seen [Dakis] Joannou's collection, and it is incredible. And despite the way it looks, I think in the end the whole deal is for the best--given the state of the art world."...
ArtsJournal
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Katherine E. Brown, currently WNYC's chief operating officer, will "oversee all nonartistic matters" at the ballet, including "fund-raising, finances, marketing, media and education, responsibilities previously held by Peter Martins, the company's ballet master in chief."...
ArtsJournal
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