Author Archives: Culture Spectator
Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at the NGA until the 6th October
By K. Mitchell Snow Dance provided the verb that animated the nouns of Serge Diaghilev’s first loves — music and art — and moved him onto the center of the world stage at the beginnings of the twentieth century. As dance historian Lynn Garafola puts it, Diaghilev “made dance a crossroads of the contemporary.” Diaghilev […]
Sicily…between Greece and Rome at the Getty Villa until the 19th August
by Richard P. Townsend An unprecedented exhibition looking at ancient Sicily—the crossroads of the Mediterranean—is on view in the perfect venue, the J. Paul Getty Museum ‘s Villa in Malibu, itself a recreation of a product of Southern Italian Antiquity. Go now and see it in Los Angeles, as the turbulence that claimed a number […]
Philbrook Downtown opened in Tulsa the 13th June
By Richard P. Townsend The venerable Philbrook Museum of Art—75 years old year this year—has opened a 21st-century museum space in the burgeoning Brady Arts District in downtown Tulsa. It is an exciting step forward not only for the museum but for the city. While this immediate effort took six years gestation, in actuality the […]
Puccini’s Tosca at L.A. Opera through the 8th June
By Richard P. Townsend Verismo, a largely Italian operatic style employing a gritty naturalism current around the turn of the last century, was its day’s reality television. Shocking and sometimes grisly narratives involving murder, suicide, adultery, prostitutes and la vie bohème were stock-in-trade for colorful scores by such figures as Umberto Giordano, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, and […]
