Libaries
‘The battle of Britain’s libraries’ is considered in The Guardian HERE, to include a look at the new £193m ‘super-library’ Library of Birmingham. Thanks to Dutch architects Mecanoo, the library will be a highly transparent glass building wrapped in delicate metal filigree, housing within its 33,500 sq m a few million books. It is a key component in the city’s bid to be the UK’s City of Culture in 2013 and should help fulfil the city council’s aim of putting Birmingham in the top 25 world cities by 2020, as ranked by the Mercer Quality of Living survey (it currently comes joint 56th, with Glasgow).
Film
Congratulations to Sandy Powelll who, as pointed out by The Guardian HERE, triumphed in the Best Costume Design category to now have won more Oscars than Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro – all of whom have just two to her three. The other British winner was Rob Beckett, who won his first Oscar for sound editing on The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s underdog victor. The low budget film scooped six awards including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director – making Bigelow the first woman to take directing honours in Oscar’s 82 year history. But does this represent a victory for women and a compelling or focussed view of what’s happening in cinema universally, or do the Academy Awards merely give us a vivid, muddled snapshot of the American mood? Discussion in The Guardian HERE, whilst The Times argues it represents ‘a big bang that changed Hollywood forever’ HERE.
Music
The world’s most influential classical music critic, Alex Ross, will deliver the annual Royal Philharmonic Society lecture to the assembled cognoscenti at the Wigmore Hall in London, entitled Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert, as he turns his gaze to the concert experience. The time has come, Ross says, to rethink the way that Brahms, Beethoven and Bruckner are presented.
Plenty of rethinking has already gone on in the UK; The Southbank Centre encourages cross-genre events, recently supporting Anna Meredith’s new concerto for beatboxer and orchestra; The Barbican puts orchestral scores to films — on Monday night a screening of Mikio Naruse’s 1933 silent film Nightly Dreams had a soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney; And the Roundhouse’s Reverb series in January, which introduced classical music to a pop venue, played to packed houses. Today’s Times asks what is the best way to reinvent the concert HERE.
Meanwhile, The Guardian looks at the effect of the No Applause Rule on the classical concert experience, arguing that the etiquette and the music sometimes work at cross-purposes. Clapping in the ‘wrong’ place comes from intuitively following instructions in the score, which explains why newcomers exhibit anxiety on the subject; it even appears that fear of incorrect applause can inhibit people from attending concerts altogether. You can read more on the question ‘If the underlying message of the protocol is, in essence: “Curb your enthusiasm. Don’t get too excited.” Should we be surprised that people aren’t as excited about classical music as they used to be? In The Guardian HERE.
