Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are about to buy Leonard Bernstein's old apartment. (That's a Scientological E-Meter to the right there, like the one that will soon sit in the place formerly occupied by Lenny's ashtray. Build your own!)Peter Frampton (link warning: auto-loading guitar music) just narrated Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf in Kentucky.
Go to Syracuse and you might just end up as an official Lou Reed scholar. (Reed's also picking up the George Arents Pioneer Medal for Excellence in the Arts.) English majors only, which may confirm your opinion of Metal Machine Music. Not mine, though—I love the noise. (Thanks to awesome sister Jeana Stewart for the tip.)
Oboist H. David Meyers has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for running an illegal sports gambling operation. (Speaking of gambling, just one more day to get in on your office Grawemeyer pool. My money's on Steve Reich—but I came up empty in MegaMillions, so maybe you should ask someone else.)
Update (3/8): The Grawemeyer? We were all wrong—me especially. Congratulations, Sebastian!
9 comments:
Curiously, the article says the apartment is "thought to have been" Leonard Bernstein's. You'd think that that information would be easy to pin. It's not as if Bernstein lived in the Dakota in the latter part of the thirteenth century -- though, somehow, it now feels as though he did.
I'm guessing that it is, and the only reason for the qualifier is that the Dakota board won't confirm it out of concern for maintaining some sort of mystique. After all, if it was mere speculation, it would be a lot funnier to say that the apartment "is thought to have been where Mia Farrow gave birth to the devil's spawn."
Is there a list of Award nominees available, along with odds?
Grawemeyer finalists are only revealed when the winner is, as far as I know. My (admittedly Americentric, since those are the premieres I've kept best track of) list might look like this:
Best guess: Steve Reich, "Daniel Variations" (4-1)
Place and show: Stephen Hartke, "The Greater Good"; Osvaldo Golijov, "Azul" (8-1)
Long shots: Ned Rorem, "Our Town"; Daniel Roumain, "Concerto for Laptop" (20-1)
European Dark Horse: Pascal Dusapin, "Faustus" (20-1)
Not a Chance: Paul McCartney, "Ecce Cor Meum" (1000-1)
With as many grains of salt as you've got: Grawemeyers more often than not surprise me. It's somewhat wide open, too, since a lot of the usual suspects who might have won it as a substitute lifetime achievement award didn't have major premieres in 2006.
If only Leonard Bernstein had Cruise and Holmes come visit before he died with the E-Meter and a copy of LRH's selected writings. They could have cured him of his homosexuality!
("Such people should be taken from the society as rapidly as possible and uniformly institutionalized; for here is the level of the contagion of immorality, and the destruction of ethics; here is the fodder which secret police organizations use for their filthy operations"-L. Ron Hubbard).
Reich seems a good guess, though it seems to me that You Are Variations is maybe a stronger work. (Works up to five years old are eligible.) I wouldn't be surprised if they gave it to Lachenmann for Concertini or Magnus Lindberg for his Clarinet Concerto. It's not too late to give it to Golijov for Ainadamar (though surely he has enough cash on hand after winning a MacArthur).
Reich seems a good guess, though it seems to me that You Are Variations is maybe a stronger work. (Works up to five years old are eligible.) I wouldn't be surprised if they gave it to Lachenmann for Concertini or Magnus Lindberg for his Clarinet Concerto. It's not too late to give it to Golijov for Ainadamar (though surely he has enough cash on hand after winning a MacArthur).
Five years? I missed that part. (This shows you how much I think about awards anymore, I don't even read the guidelines.) Then I think you're right, Lindberg or Ainadamar seem like good bets. That also puts Carter's "Three Illusions" and Wuorinen's Haroun in the running as well. So it's a crapshoot. I'd still put my money on a piece with an implicit or explicit dramatic component—concerto, oratorio, opera, etc. (Now that I've said that, of course, they'll probably give it to the most abstract string quartet out there.)
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