- The New York Times has more on that 2011 Spring into Music festival at Carnegie Hall to which the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was invited: “First made public last June, the series is intended to encourage orchestras to program imaginatively, without regard to marketing considerations. … The main idea is for the orchestras to present programs that have special meaning for them and speak to their individual missions.”
- A prime example of the imaginative programming? The DSO’s August 4, 1964, the single work the DSO will perform. “In sharpest contrast, the Albany Symphony will present a program of 10 works, with George Tsontakis’s “Let the River Be Unbroken” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” framing eight pieces from its Spirituals Project, contemporary settings of spirituals for baritone and orchestra.”
- The collaborative classic: Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Edward FitzGerald’s famous poem, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is now online — with the five different versions of the text that the author wrote, plus visitors can “tag the poem and leave comments, almost as though FitzGerald had blogged his work, rather than publishing it on paper.”
- Remember the report that Jerry Jones hopes to add some art and art-like stuff to that very large and expensive building in Arlington that people refer to as Jonestown (OK, I call it that. I’m trying to start a trend here. “Jerryworld” is far too cute and friendly for that looming alien saucer). “One of the things we wanted to do is involve artwork in this stadium. Contemporary art,” Jones said. “We’ll be featuring some of that in places that is about motion and about strength and about a lot of those kinds of things.”
- Well, that sounds an awful lot like what they’ve done at Nationals Park in D.C., right down to the “motion” and “strength.” They’ve put up colorful mobiles by Walter Kravitz and monuments to Washington baseball greats, done by an Israeli-born sculptor named Omri Amrany who specializes in sports art:
- “Rather than zooming, however, his bronze appears to glop. It has the unfortunate effect of making his players seem covered in tumorous growths. They also get multiple arms. . . . As for the grace and power we expect from significant art, forget about finding it in any of these works. Translated into baseball terms, a team would have to place dead last in the major leagues to rank as low as this work does as art. Come to think of it, these four pieces may count as the Washington Nationals of art.
- The Texas Ballet Theater has announced its plans for the Fly Ball on April 18 — “Destination Paris ” — in the Fort Worth Ballroom in the new Omni Fort Worth Hotel. It’s one of the TBT’s largest annual fundraisers, and this year’s honorary chair? Lyle Lovett.
- And the DMN Arts Blog has a review of comedian Dennis Leary’s performance last night at the Nokia.
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