Recent links of note:
“How We’ll Be Able to Hear Live Music This Summer”
Justin Davidson, Curbed
As vaccination numbers rise and infection rates fall, a renaissance of live performance may be on the way as early as this summer, although it seems the concert halls of the Big Apple will remain shuttered for a few months more. With around sixty thousand of New York’s ninety-thousand employees in the arts out of work, most musicians will take whatever they can get as soon as possible. Justin Davidson writes for Curbed on the surprisingly wide selection of concerts and pop-up events on the docket for the coming months.
“Three new releases that show the classical recording industry is alive and well”
Richard Bratby, The Spectator
Musicians dependent on live performance might be in dire straits (see the recent furor between the employees and the administration at New York’s Metropolitan Opera), but for those few lucky enough to have recording contracts, Richard Bratby tells us, business is marching along apace. Bratby reviews three new discs offering fresh takes on old classics for The Spectator.
“Does the past look better in black and white?”
Phillip Prodger, Apollo
It’s a worn fallacy that photography shows objective truth. Getting your hands dirty with the lengthy, subjective process of developing and printing a film photograph drives home the realization that, just like other art forms, photography can be manipulated and deployed to aesthetic, ideological, or documentary ends.
You may have noticed the rise in colorized photographs on social media pages in recent years, often created by increasingly accurate AI algorithms. How does colorizing a historical photograph alter the original aims of the creator? Does it violate artistic integrity or distort the historical record? It turns out this is not a new line of questioning, as colorizing processes (and color photography, as I’ve written before) have been around for quite a bit longer than one might expect. Phillip Prodger, the former Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London, traces the history of colorization back to the dawn of photography in an article for Apollo.
Podcasts:
“Roger Kimball introduces the March issue.” A new podcast from the Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion.
Dispatch:
“La tragedia è finita!,” by Paul du Quenoy. On Palm Beach Opera’s festival of live performances.