The members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra are home from this season’s Carnegie Hall adventure; communications director Adam Crane reports that the pilot of the plane on which his SLSO contingent flew greeted the players, and offered congratulations on…
An Acheulian hand axe
In an essay in Friday’s New York Times, Denis Dutton, a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, asks “Has conceptual art jumped the shark tank?”
It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking…
When Rocco Landesman was appointed director of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), I asked rhetorically if we couldn’t do better than have a commercial producer of Broadway musicals be our national arts’ czar, however limited a job that is considering its…
It should come as absolutely no news to anyone who follows opera that New York City Opera is on the ropes and seeking to reopen its labor contracts. Its next season has been cut back to just five operas, down…
Class act: The group of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians who performed in Zankel Hall on Friday night did so after playing a concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan the night before, spending weary hours attempting to get to New York,…
A copy of the New York Times sat outside my hotel room’s door this morning — and there on the bottom of A1 was a refer for chief critic Anthony Tommasini’s (highly favorable) review of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s…
