The Who’s Tommy at the Dallas Theater Center with Nehal Joshi and Heath Williams II. Photo by Brandon Thibodeaux. Guest Blogger Gail Sachson owns Ask Me About Art, is Vice-Chair of the Cultural Affairs Commission and a member of the Public Art Committee. She is an auxiliary member of the Dallas Theater Center Board of [...]
The Aug. 25 issue of New York magazine features its “Approval Matrix” on p. 184 — a rather Spy magazine-like device in which recent cultural events are mapped out on a grid according to how “highbrow” or “lowbrow” they are and how “despicable” or “brilliant.” In the “brilliant” but “lowbrow” quadrant, for instance, New York [...]
Changes are afoot at the Bayreuth Festival, the annual Bavarian event devoted exclusively to the operas of Richard Wagner. The 2008 festival concludes today, signaling the end of the long directorship of Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s grandson. He will turn 89 on Saturday and is reported to be in poor health. His resignation takes effect [...]
It’s difficult to assess the presidential candidates’ differences on the arts, arts funding and arts education for a simple reason: Senator McCain doesn’t seem to have spelled out any stand on these issues, other than a general opposition to funding “obscenity.” This isn’t meant as a partisan statement in support of Senator Obama. If you [...]
It’s still nine months away, but subscriptions to the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition go on sale at 9 a.m. Friday. This edition, the 13th, will last more than two weeks, opening on May 22 and closing on June 7. The venue is, of course, Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth. An international lineup [...]
Still from Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation News of this year’s lineup at the Dallas Video Festival has begun trickling out, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-by-shot remake of the original Indiana Jones movie by a trio of Mississippi teenagers. Actually, the boys were 12 when they started [...]
This week’s issue of the Dallas Observer (not yet available online) features not one but two sizable arts profiles, cover boy Kevin Moriarty, the new artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, and an inside “City” column on George Steel, the new general director of the Dallas Opera. The usual talk of a watershed moment [...]
Image from www.secsportsfan.com/sec-swimming-and-diving.html Southern Methodist University English professor and long-time editor-in-chief of The Southwest Review, Willard Spiegelman has a wonderfully reflective essay in the new issue of American Scholar on swimming — part personal memoir, part literary history and part of a new book by him, Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, due from Farrar [...]
London’s Globe Theatre is launching its own record label, Globe Editions, this fall as a way to reach new audiences. The first album, Elizabethan Street Songs, is performed by early music expert and Globe musician Jim Bisgood and his band Tarleton’s Jig, using traditional instruments such as the sackbut, archlute and hurdygurdy. Important caveat: The [...]
The resurrection that Mahler wrote about in his Symphony No. 2 involved eternal life in celestial realms, but on Sunday night in Fort Worth it was possible to see in the work a less lofty, though important, significance: the rebirth of an orchestra. The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra had done justice to a strenuous marathon [...]
