More about That Night from the Boo York Times.
To cut to the chase: the creation of art is a risky business. There are few guarantees of quality, of profundity or of the longevity of the work’s appeal. The creation of any sort of art is therefore an experiment, and as with a scientific experiment, failure is a possible outcome.
Failure, then, is one source of bad art. But without the possibility of failure, success is at best limited to a narrow variation on what has already worked. But if we hope to see something original and news, we should realistically be prepared for the failed attempt. Read more »
La Cieca shudders to think that Hugh Canning may be indulging in a trifle more anatomical detail than is absolutely necessary:
The few touches of colour make big statements: the hostess’s red camellia at the Act I festivities, or her scarlet and her friend’s pink one at Flora’s gambling party.
The controversy over the new Met Tosca has driven parterre box’s weekly page views to an all-time high, for the first time ever topping the 100,000 mark. For the week of September 20-26, 2009, a total of 110,413 pageviews were logged by Google Analytics, far surpassing the previous record of 90,505 achieved in the third week of March, 2009. The opening night chat alone garnered over 15,000 views.
The New York Times, in its never-ending quest to find more expensive and less relevant ways to cover the arts, has dispatched Daniel J. Wakin to Rome for an in-depth conversation with the man of the hour, Franco Zeffirelli. The legendary stage director, conceding that he has not had a fair chance to tell his side of the Tosca story in the pages of the Times, agreed to unprecedented access for Wakin and the paper’s videographers. A snippet of the hard-hitting interview follows the jump.
And this is so not someone I expected to turn up at the Embassy Ball.
As newpapers across the nation decimate their staffs, as arts writers beg to write free for blogs, and as (apparently) nothing else happens in the world today, Alan Daniel J. Wakin is still answering Franco Zeffirelli’s drunk-dials. Hilarious takeaway: Frengo metaphorically compares the fag-specific metier of operatic stage direction to heterosexual marriage. [NYT]
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