The Teacher in Literature: As Portrayed in the Writings of Ascham, Moliere, Rousseau, Shenstone, Fuller, Pestalozzi, Cowper, Goethe, Irving, Mitford, ... Thackeray, Hughes, Dickens, Eliot and Others
Sam's Spot (Free subscription) | 23/11/2009
(link to english site: http://www.festesdethalie.org/welcome.html) I was invited to go to a concert in the Chateau Thoiry on Saturday. It was a mixture of scenes from Moliere's plays and baroque music. (Here is a link to the English site ) It was lovely - except we had terrible seats (way in the back of the room - all we could see were the actor's heads, luckily they were very expressive). The music...
KillerMovies (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
Demian Bichir has signed on to star in the Mexican film "Hidalgo-Moliere," about the father of the Mexican independence movement. Antonio Serrano ("Sex, Shame and Tears") is directing "Hidalgo-Moliere," which focuses on Hidalgo's early years in the theater and his rise to leading the Mexican War of Independence in the early 1800s..
IndieLondon (Free subscription) | 17/11/2009
THE first London revival in 25 years of Mikhail Bulgakov’s modern classic, Molière or The League of Hypocrites , runs at Finborough Theatre from Tuesday, November 24 to Saturday, December 19, 2009. This world premiere of a translation by Michael Glenny is directed by Blanche McIntyre – the inaugural winner of the Leverhulme Bursary for Emerging Theatre Directors. Jean-Baptiste Molière...
The Eastside View (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
W E DO LIKE TO GO to the theater, Lindsey and I. We see all the plays in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival ; we see nearly all the plays in Los Angeles (Glendale, actually) at A Noise Within . We catch occasional plays closer to home, in Berkeley or San Francisco or even up here in Sonoma county, in Santa Rosa or Sebastopol. We like the standard repertory; we like new plays; we like the classics;...
Londonist (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009
What'll it be worth? We just don't know! Take your chances at RCA Secret this week Our pick of what you should be getting excited about this week is a little theatre-heavy. But that's sometimes the way. If you know about anything new we've missed, let us know in the comments below. Be There First: London Shows Opening Major new art exhibitions opening this week are a bit thin on the ground. We're...
Risky Regencies (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009
A few weeks ago I blogged on the birthday of a "bad girl of history," Pauline Bonaparte. Today is the birthday of another one! Ninon de Lenclos, who was born November 10, 1620. Ninon was a writer, courtesan, and patron of the arts in Louis XIV's France. When she died at the age of 85, Saint-Simon wrote of her, "A shining example of the triumph of vice, when directed with intelligence...
Forensics & Faith (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
The quinquagenarian, also quite the deipnosophist, worked up a hidrosis as he sought to gorgonize his two dinner mates, one asthenic and one pyriform. Your turn. GORGONIZE (GAR-gun-IZE) verb--to have a paralyzing or mesmerizing effect upon. HYPOCORISM (hy-POCK-uh-RIZ-um) noun--a pet name or term of endearment. CREPEHANGER (KRAPE-hang-er) noun--one who takes a pessimistic view of things; a killjoy....
DCist (Free subscription) | 31/10/2009
(L to R) Iréne Theorin (Ariadne), Lyubov Petrova (Zerbinetta), Nathan Herfindahl, Corey Evan Rotz, Greg Fedderly, and Grigory Soloviov, in Ariadne auf Naxos, Washington National Opera (photo by Karin Cooper -- see more pictures ) Washington National Opera's new production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos puts me in a bit of a quandary. It has a score and libretto of particular beauty...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 27/10/2009
"'Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy,' says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California, who presented the work at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago last week."...
Life in a day (Free subscription) | 27/10/2009
The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit. Moliere
BBC News (Free subscription) | 26/10/2009
Armando Iannuci, the man behind The Thick of It
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 24/10/2009
Tony Harrison, winner of the PEN/Pinter prize, on his literary heroes Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in The Gaze of the Gorgon . There is a monument to Heine in a park outside the Frankfurt Opera...
Ionarts (Free subscription) | 21/10/2009
Opera Lafayette’s 15th anniversary season opened to a full house at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, with a program featuring the collaboration of Charpentier and Molière. Opera Lafayette Artistic Director Ryan Brown reminded the audience in his concise spoken introduction that music of the French Baroque equally encompasses both the “high and low brow,” a goal to which...
The Rehearsal Studio (Free subscription) | 20/10/2009
Yesterday I submitted a comment to San Francisco Classical Voice in response to Jason Victor Serinus' review of the current San Francisco Opera production of Richard Strauss' Salome . I wanted to pick up on his observation that Kim Begley had played Herod as "a pathetic wimp of a lush hardly capable of wearing the crown" (without saying very much about whether this was Begley's decision,...
The Classical Beat (Free subscription) | 19/10/2009
Lovers of French Baroque opera in the DC area are faced with an embarrassment of riches this evening. Tonight in Washington at the Terrace Theater, Opera Lafayette is presenting the first program of its 15th season: Charpentier's salon opera "Les Arts Florissants," plus some choreographed musical inserts the composer wrote to be performed in a comedy by Molière, sung by François...
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