Pittsburgh Opera receives biggest ever gift
NewsA Pittsburgh real estate developer Francois Bitz has given $5 million to his local opera, its biggest gift in eight decades.
The company’s premises will be renamed the Bitz Opera Factory.
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That is truly the ugliest opera house ever, and that includes Paris’s Bastille.
It’s not an opera house. It’s offices and rehearsal spaces. https://www.pittsburghopera.org/facilities/pittsburgh-opera-headquarters/
Don’t imagine that’s the theater. I don’t see any fly space for scenery.
Uhm…..it’s not a picture of the opera house…this is the Pittsburgh Opera office and rehearsal space. And, as far as ugly rehearsal spaces go, I can name many in Europe that are far uglier. Most are ugly warehouses, poorly heated and air conditioned, and in areas where there are few amenities for those who work there.
I just read an interesting profile of Peter Gelb in NY Magazine in which he notes that, early in his tenure, directors often didn’t want to work at the Met because people saw it as an “opera factory.” Funny that Pittsburgh Opera is simply embracing that.
That isn’t the opera house, it’s an administrative building. Performances are in a lovely old movie palace.
Wonderful! Another Great Benefactor who can have His Name immortalized on a building, gently nudge the policies of the institute He now feels He owns, and enjoy the crawling of His artistic underlings before His Magnificent Feet.
Another proof of the abject status of the arts in a degenerate country where money is king, charity replaces solidarity, and public money needs to go to a bloated military, not to culture
And what have you done for the arts? Besides that half price, very side stall proms ticket you bought 3 years ago?
For about thirty years, I attend between 50 and 60 concerts and opera productions each season, in a couple of dozen cities in Belgium, Holland, Germany and France, and sometimes even further away from my home close to Brussels. I always take the best seats since it’s kind of pointless to drive 4 hours to sit somewhere where you can’t hear and see very well. It costs me about 10% of my yearly income. ONLY 10%, not because I’m such a high earner, but because the arts are publicly funded in Europe. This in sharp contrast to the degenerate society that is the US of A.
Any other questions?
And how did you gain such insight into the US of A, degeneracy, and benefactors as well as a raging bitterness toward all three from your perch in Brussels?
Today it’s benefactors, next week it will be something else. When you are a journalist who has been following developments in the USA for over a decade, it’s hard to chose. Last week I talked to a professor at the University of Michigan. Their university hospital is the hub of the health system in the state, and spiraled into a financial crisis and a wave of absurd cost cutting thanks to the pandemic. On the other hand U of M sits on a mountain of 13 billion dollars of donor money (which grew with 2 billion during the pandemic) that they can’t use for their hospitals because the donors specify for what it can be used – preferably shiny buildings with their names on it.
Another exhibit, also from last week: billionaire donor Charlie Munger who, with no knowledge of architecture, “designed” the dorm he graciously wants to donate to the U of California himself, and decided the rooms should be windowless.
And that’s just donors. I could go on and on about every aspect of life in the USA, from life expectancy and child mortality (lower and higher than almost all Western nations) to student debt and crumbling roads and bridges. Oh, just one more: it’s absolutely hilarious that you still need an infrastructure bill to get broadband. In my country most people don’t even remember the word.
Of course, you still can be proud of your shiny, magnificent military that costs more than the ten next most expensive armies in the world, but lets one out of seven of its veterans live in poverty and hasn’t been able to win a war since 1986, when it invaded the mighty island state of Grenada.
“Tintin in the Congo”…how is life in the glass house?
Nice try.
Bitz Opera Factory??! What branding firm came up with this name, and a board that approved it. A factory’s image is diametrically opposed to any arts organization’s output and purpose. Pittsburgh’s self image as the Steel City has gone too far. Gives a critic the perfect metaphor when a dead performance without any spark, creativity etc. is next done. “What do you expect, it came out of a factory.”
They must reject it out-of-hand since accepting it would be profiting from and promoting a cis-gendered, heteronormative, white protate-haver of European origin who, no doubt, considers their gift to be affirmation of white supremacy. It is so clearly racist and transphobic that this money isn’t used to support the marginalized and aria-starved minority neighborhoods in Pittsburgh.
When you’re making fun of something, it’s important to check your spelling. Wouldn’t you agree, Brain?
That’s an old Westinghouse factory built in the 1800s and it’s quite attractive, actually.