By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
They're changing the guard at the Kennedy Center. Two key shapers of Washington's cultural life have stepped in, soon to be followed by a third. The full impact of these changes at the nation's busiest performing arts institution won't be felt for some time, as program schedules are sometimes set years in advance. Still, the purpose of the new appointments was certainly not to maintain the status quo.
The Los Angeles Opera's 2013-14 season will include the company premiere of Philip Glass' "Einstein on the Beach" and a revival of Britten's "Billy Budd" as part of celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth.
Hundreds of friends and family on Thursday remembered sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar as an unfailingly generous teacher with a gentle spirit and sense of humor whose music fostered understanding between East and West.
Texas' Ballet Austin is taking a performance about intolerance and the Holocaust on an international tour, visiting Miami, Washington and Israel over the next year.
Within a small rectangle of light, nearly a dozen dancers writhed and convulsed on the stage, pressed together by imaginary walls denoting some kind of death chamber.
The 36th edition of the Spoleto Festival USA is open in Charleston.
The Spoleto Festival USA opens its 36th season Friday and among the planned performances is an opera by American composer Philip Glass to commemorate his 75th birthday and his long relationship with the internationally known arts festival.
This year's Cannes Film Festival is opening with a New England accent.
Philip Glass' "The Perfect American," imagining the final months of the life of Walt Disney, will have its world premiere at Madrid's Teatro Real on Jan. 22, 2013.
"Satyagraha," Philip Glass' at times magical _ and at times maddening _ meditation on the early career of Gandhi, is back at the Metropolitan Opera where it enjoyed a triumphant run three years ago.
Philip Glass is one of the most famous names in modern music, a composer whose minimalist, hypnotically repetitive scores have attracted huge audiences over the past four decades - and divided them into warring camps.
"Boy, this is a great city," says Woody Allen, lounging on a park bench that overlooks Manhattan's East River and the 59th Street Bridge. "I don't care what anybody says. It's really a knockout, you know?"
"I am definitely honored and delighted and when I saw who else was in the academy I was sure they had made some kind of mistake," he said.
As Glass says in a program note, "without an understandable text to contend with ... the weight of `meaning' would then be thrown onto the music, the designs and the stage action."
