Florens 2012, 5: Marketing Italy — with Sustainability...and a Word about Museums, by Michael MIller

Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, Oil on canvas, 1757. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In a part of Florens 2012, the academics, business figures, and other experts who attend will explore the subjects developed two years ago, within a wide-ranging scheme, specifically tailored for this meeting, mainly the theme: “from the Grand Tour to the Global Tour.” Fundamentally, the way the world perceives Italy and enjoys the many extraordinary things the country has to offer descend from the Grand Tour, the capstone of an English aristocrat’s education beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing on into our own time, however much its character has been democratized in the twentieth century. On the Grand Tour a young man would make the journey to Italy, often in the company of a tutor, or some educated older male companion. He saw the sights, studied them, dabbled in the Italian language, indulged in pleasures, and collected. It would be a sorry Grand Tour that didn’t bring home antiquities, paintings, drawings, or some odd objects as mementos of the young man’s discoveries.


Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








Wieland Kuijken, Eva Legêne, and Arthur Haas perform in the McConnell Auditorium at Simon’s Rock on Saturday night, September 22 at 8 pm

Wieland Kuijken, Eva Legêne, and Arthur Haas perform in the McConnell Auditorium at Simon’s Rock on Saturday night, September 22 at 8 pm

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The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed at the University of Virginia Art Museum and the Museum of Biblical Art in New York – A Review by Michael Miller

Bartolo di Fredi, Adoration of the Magi, tempera on panel. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.

The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed,

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, March 2 – May 22, 2012
on view from June 8 to September 9, 2012 at the Museum of Biblical Art.

Curated by Bruce Boucher, Director of the UVa Museum.
Catalogue with essays by Bruce Boucher, Francesca Fiorani, Wolfgang Loseries, and Anna Maria Guiducci

The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed is a what museum people call a focus exhibition. It is built around a single work of art in a museum’s collection, supplemented by other works which cast light on one or more aspects of the work. For the museum, it is an opportunity to take the work out of its usual context in the gallery and to direct the visitor’s attention towards that one individual work and its own historical context.This rich exhibition had several themes: the reconstruction of the dismembered work of art, the re-evaluation of the artist who created it, the Sienese master Bartolo di Fredi, the date, the patron, and the original location of the work. This small, but ambitious exhibition goes beyond even this. Through a series of thumbnail biographies, it provides the reader with a guide to Sienese painting in the decades following the Black Death, a period which remains underestimated and comparatively little-known. The exhibition catalogue would make an instructive companion to a visit to the Siena Pinacoteca and the churches of the city.

Read the full review on New York Arts

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Florens 2012, 3: The Recommendations of Florens 2010 – a Personal Commentary by Micaehl Miller

Jacques Callot, La Fiera di Impruneta, etching and engraving. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

To read installment 1, "Petition Madness in the Art World…and a Search for Solutions: Florens 2012," click here.

To read installment 2, "Florens 2012, 2: the target areas established by Florens 2010 and proposals for solutions," Click here.

It seems right to begin by grounding whatever else I have to say in the recommendations of Florens 2010. Since much of this will be discussed at Florens 2012. I’ve entered my thoughts simply as comments on the thirteen proposals of 2010. Some of these mention examples from my experiences in the U.S. While the U.S. scored quite well in the Florens 2010 surveys, there is no reason why it should be considered exemplary. The arts struggle there as much as anywhere, although there are a variety of resources to support it. The Tanglewood Music Festival is without a doubt the most important summer music festival and school in the country. They have just published their attendance figures for this past summer, the summer of their 75th anniversary celebrations, and it is makes for depressing reading. The most popular classical concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra — and these were the cornerstone of the founder, Serge Koussevitzky’s vision for the festival — ranked ninth below eight pop concerts and semi-popular ceremonial events. Even with an array of private and corporate donors at hand and painstakingly cultivated, the arts have to work hard in the New World to survive and risk compromising their mission.

The text of the Florens 2010 proposals is in red. My comments are in black.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!







Crusading for Reason in an Age of Anger: Redefining Opera’s Role — Glimmerglass Festival 2012 and a Social-Centric Agenda by Seth Lachterman

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L to R: Glimmerglass Festival Artistic & General Director Francesca Zambello, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Glimmerglass Festival Managing Director Linda Jackson. Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.


Aida
Music by Giuseppe Verdi, Libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, 1871
Ramfis, bass-baritone – Joseph Barron
Radamès, tenor – Noah Stewart
Amneris, mezzo-soprano – Daveda Karanas
Aida, soprano – Michelle Johnson
The King, bass – Phillip Gay
Amonasro, bass-baritone – Eric Owens

Conductor – Nader Abbassi
Director – Francesca Zambello
Sets – Lee Savage
Costumes – Bibhu Mohapatra
Lighting – Robert Wierzel
Choreographer – Eric Sean Fogel
Hair & Makeup Design – Anne Ford-Coates

Lost in the Stars
Music by Kurt Weill, Book and Lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, 1949 (based on the novel, Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton).

The Leader, tenor – Sean Panikkar
Answerer, mezzo-soprano – Bongiwe Nakani
Nika – Chebet Too
Grace Kumalo – Ernestine Jackson
Stephen Kumalo, bass-baritone – Eric Owens
Arthur Jarvis, baritone – Ryan MacConnell
James Jarvis – Wynn Harmon
John Kumalo, baritone – Amos Nomnabo
Linda, mezzo-soprano – Chrystal Williams
Absalom, tenor – Makudupanyane Senaoana
Irina, mezzo-soprano – Brandy Lynn Hawkins
The Judge – Jake Gardner
Alex – Caleb McLaughlin

Conductor – John DeMain
Director – Tazewell Thompson
Sets & Costumes – Michael Mitchell
Lighting – Robert Wierzel
Choreographer – Anthony Salatino
Hair & Makeup Design – Anne Ford-Coates

The Music Man
Book, Music and Lyric by Meredith Willson

Harold Hill – Dwayne Croft
Marian Paroo -  Elizabeth Futral
Marcellus Washburn – Josh Walden
Mayor Shinn – Jake Gardner
Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn – Ernestine Jackson
Mrs. Paroo – Cindy Gold
Winthrop Paroo – Henry Wager

Conductor – John DeMain
Director & Choreographer – Marcia Milgrom Dodge
Sets – James Noone
Costumes – Leon Wiebers
Lighting – Kevin Adams
Hair & Makeup Design – Anne Ford-Coates

Armide (1686)
Music by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Libretto by Philippe Quinault (after Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberateai)
Co-production with Opera Atelier

Armide, soprano – Peggy Kriha Dye
Renaud, tenor – Colin Ainsworth
Hidroat, bass – João Fernandez
Hatred, bass-baritone – Curtis Sullivan

Conductor – David Fallis
Director – Marshall Pynkoski
Choreographer – Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg
Sets – Gerard Gauci
Costumes – Dora Rust D’Eye
Lighting – Bonnie Beecher
Light Director – Jennifer Parr,
Hair & Makeup Design – Anne Ford-Coates

Should Art be merely an escape or refuge from the realities of our difficult times? In the 1940s, the debate heated and divided artists, musicians and scholars. In Wallace Stevens’s essay “The Noble Rider and The Sound of Words,” the twain are resolved in the idea that art, even “abstract” art can assume the role of social commentary only through innate and ineffable transformations of reality rather than by any explicit agenda dogmatically imposed by the creator. Great art could not be manhandled ideologically. How this solution might apply to opera of the past becomes the task of the director and musicians in balancing the surprisingly diverse elements of the music’s intent, the libretto’s intent, the historical context, and, yes, the composer’s objectives, if any. It is not surprising that Stevens regarded that an artistic creation had its own life apart from the creator’s wishes. Thus, we have the license for interpretation and deconstruction that has become the hallmark of Regietheater in our times.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts!

Florens 2012, 2: the target areas established by Florens 2010 and proposals for solutions, by Michael Miller

Filippo Napoletano, La Fiera di Impruneta, oil on canvas, 1618. Galleria Palatina.

Read installment 1: “Petition Madness in the Art World…and a Search for Solutions: Florens 2012″

Much of the report on Florens 2010, the strategic study, deals with analyses of the kind of data we associate with audience surveys. The data a statistical, and in digesting them, the authors work with quantified phenomena that can be consistently compared. The methods, which are clearly described, reflect standard methods and different studies are brought in for comparison.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!







Turner at the Tate by Huntley Dent

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A penny for the old guy. The original London Eye wasn’t a Ferris wheel on the Thames but J.M.W. Turner, whose visual genius and all-encompassing vision engulfed everything in its path. Until the electroshock treatment applied by Francis Bacon, generations of British painters were subsumed by him. Paying obeisance to the great man is both a duty and a delight when visiting Tate Britain, and now the Turner galleries have been completely rehung for the first time since the mid-Nineties.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

The UNC Symphony Orchestra has won The American Prize in Orchestral Performance – College/University Division for 2012

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Music Director Tonu Kalam and the UNC Symphony Orchestra take their bows.

The University of North Carolina Symphony Orchestra has won The American Prize in Orchestral Performance – College/University Division for 2012. This is an important award, and we congratulate maestro Tonu Kalam and his outstanding student musicians on their achievement. For a review of one of their concerts, read Steven Kruger’s account of his visit to Chapel Hill, “Two Orchestral Concerts at Chapel Hill: Tonu Kalam conducts the UNC Symphony Orchestra; Vladimir Ashkenazy conducts the European Union Youth Orchestra”:click here.

Click here to see a video of their award-winning performance of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances.

Petition Madness in the Art World…and a Search for Solutions: Florens 2012, by Michael Miller

Leonardo da Vinci, The Battle of Anghiari (Tavola Doria)

The past year has been a turbulent one in the world of old masters, at least in certain pools of it. In some quarters, it has been a year of angry petitions. This article concerns Italy, but I shall begin in Germany, since the most active center of trouble at the moment is Berlin, where the administration of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz plans to move the great collection of old master paintings from the Gemäldegalerie at the suburban Kulturforum in order to accomodate Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch’s collection of surrealist and modern art, which they have offered as a gift. A selection of the old masters will go to the Bode Museum on the Museuminsel, where they were originally intended to be from the beginning, but this facility is too small to house the entire collection. The remainder will go into storage until suitable gallery space can be found or built. This has not yet been planned, and funds have not been allocated. Several similar projects, planned after the Reunification, have become stalled over the years, and leaders in the field like Professor Jeffrey Hamburger of Harvard are concerned. 

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!







BBC Proms 67 and 69: The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly by Huntley Dent

Chailly

Rocky road.  Rebuilding an orchestra is one of the most complex tasks imaginable, requiring delicate negotiations as well as sometimes abrupt firings, a soothing hand with the musicians’ pride but also a new broom to sweep out the old dust. Riccardo Chailly, who at 69 is an eminence on the podium, set out to renew the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus, historically the orchestra of Mendelssohn. Languishing behind the Iron Curtain after World War II did them no good, however, and where the Dresden Staatskapelle managed miraculously to keep up world-class standards, the Leipzigers weren’t so lucky. I didn’t hear them during their long dark period, but the recordings that came West were nothing special, except in Mendelssohn.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!