The big issue of the day is whether Congressmen and women should rise to applaud when the Pope pauses for breath in his inaugural address on September 24.
Everything, it appears, is political. Here’s the tenor of debate in the Catholic press:
Is a papal address to Congress like a symphony or an opera? If it is a symphony, then members of Congress should sit quietly through the address until the pope finishes. You do not applaud during a symphony, even between movements. If it is opera, then the members would be permitted to jump up and applaud whenever they think the pope hits the right note.
In the political theater that is Washington, this distinction really matters. The state of the union address is clearly opera with the president’s party responding to applause lines. Should this be the model for the pope’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 24? The general consensus is that the Democrats are better off if the papal address is treated like an opera while the Republicans would be better off with a symphony.
The best-selling children’s author has this to say:
Every child needs to encounter music as early as possible, and I don’t mean just listen and then answer questions: I mean make, with voice, with clapping hands and stamping feet, with instruments of every kind.
First of all I’d make sure that every school had a talented and qualified teacher of singing. Children will sing very willingly if they can see and hear that it’s fun. I vividly remember the first time I sang a round in class; I can’t remember whether it was “Frère Jacques”, or “London’s Burning”, but I do remember the delight of waiting till it was my turn to come in, and finding the right note, and hearing my voice winding in and out of the lines and making a pattern with others.
Then I’d require every school to provide instrumental teaching for every child…
‘Every government secretary of state or minister should jolly well go to the theatre, go to a concert, go to an art gallery, go to a museum, become somehow interested in these things,” Pullman told Sky News. “If they’re not interested, they shouldn’t be in government, full stop. You’re lacking a human dimension of some sort if you’re not interested in the arts. And I think it’s a terrible fate to be ruled by philistines and barbarians as we seem to be at the moment.’
Scott Harrison, external relations head of the Detroit Symphony, has been named chief exec of the Los Angeles Chamber Orch. Scott, 35, walks into an orch in flux.
Music director Jeffrey Kahane is leaving after 20 years, donations are down 50% and no-one knows what the orch is there for any more.
Only way is up.
The Italian conductor Renato Balsadonna has let it be known that he’s tired of London, or at least of the Royal Opera House. He will leave a year from now. An advert for his successor went out today.
photo (c) Neil Gillespie
UPDATE: We understand Renato wants to upgrade to a career as an opera conductor.
The Latvian mezzo Elīna Garanča cancelled all engagements five weeks ago to look after her sick mother.
Elina has now notified the Met that she remains in mourning and will not sing in Anna Bolena, starting September 26. Her replacement is 2013 Cardiff winner Jamie Barton.
Mikhail Gantvarg, dismissed head of the St Peterburg Conservatoire, has been describing how he was summoned home from a concert tour in California to be sacked by Putin’s minister of culture, Medinsky.
Asked if Valery Gergiev had a hand in his removal, Gantvarg says: ‘maybe not him.’
The Toronto Film Festival has come up with a trailer for a lost, unfinished Sidney Pollack doc which led on to Queen Aretha’s breakthrough album, Amazing Grace.
Keep your eyes peeled for the Jagger cameo amid some amazing energy.
Diana Damrau has pulled out of next week’s European Youth Orch gig at Grafenegg. Luxury dep: Angela Gheorghiu.
Twenty-four years ago this week, a group of ex-Soviet generals seized president Mikhail Gorbachev and held him hostage in Crimea. As tanks advanced on the centres of government in Moscow and Leningrad, thousands of citizens turned out to block their way.
Among them was the great cellist, Mstistlav Rostropovich, seen here relieving an exhausted parliamentary guard of his rifle.
UPDATE: Olga Rostropovich adds: The guy next to Slava is the ” bodyguard ” which was assignend to him! His name is Yura. At some point Yura fell asleep and dropped his weapon. Dad picked it up so not to wake the “bodyguard” up.
Slava emerged as an outspoken supporter of the day’s political hero, Boris Yeltsin. The coup – which I watched live on television from the nervous safety of a media conference in Helsinki – was overcome within days.
Gorbachev was released but, broken, resigned before the year was out, to be succeeded by Yeltsin.
h/t: Boris Brovtsyn
The victim was 13, the teacher in his 30s. He got her pregnant.
A court in Salem, Mass., sentenced Joshua Garsteck to a term of seven to eight years.
In other news: Music teacher is arrested in Zionsville, Ind., accused of molesting a 12 year-old girl.
It has been a quiet summer on the Green Hill, but such news as there was has been leaking out on @BayreuthFest, a fake Twitter account.
It seems Katie Wagner had never heard of Twitter. Now she has.
The hoaxer is a 24 year-old Wagner lover called Juana Zimmermann. She has offered to turn over her account to the official festival, so far without a response.
The Hong Kong Phil is back in the limelight, again for the wrong reasons.
Local politicians want to know why the orchestra gave a private concert on tour in the Amsterdam home of a Dutch billionaire’s wife, Gert-Jan Kramer. The couple are close friends of HK’s busy music director, Jaap van Zweeden.
The HK Phil receives half its funding from the HK government. It’s not a rich man’s toy.
