The opening line of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” is one of the most famous in literature. But Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, whose moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, conspicuously avoid placing those classic three words at the start. It’s an early declaration of independence, the kind that artists have always … Read more
Even by Manhattan real estate standards, Café Carlyle is an intimate venue. The storied Upper East Side cabaret is just 988 square feet and seats 90 patrons, which means a performer can hear an audience member’s cutlery, not to mention their whispers. When Hamilton Leithauser first played there in 2018, that cozy ambience posed an … Read more
A revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the much-loved 1964 musical, received the most nominations on Tuesday for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. The show got 13 nods — seven more than any other musical or play — including best musical revival, where it is up against a production of “Hello, … Read more
For years before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would later explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations. She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the … Read more
This article is part of our Design special section about the reverence for handmade objects. It took nearly five years for Kyre Chenven and Ivano Atzori to buy a cluster of ruined houses in southern Sardinia. The single-story buildings, or rather, the skeletons that remained, once made up a furriadroxu, a type of agrarian community … Read more
This article is part of our Design special section about the reverence for handmade objects. In late August 2020, eight humanoid statues appeared in a quiet corner of the Saint-Sophia of Kyiv conservation area, a 12-acre museum complex that is centered on the thousand-year-old Saint-Sophia Cathedral. Called “Shadows,” the clay-and-copper sculptures — each faceless and … Read more
Many major museum curators have Ph.D.s, and yet some are going back to school this month during an art fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Last year, the European Fine Art Foundation, the nonprofit organization that puts on the fair, held its first Curator Course. The coming second edition will have 10 participants from museums all … Read more
ON A WARM September afternoon in subarctic Finland, the architect Laura Mattila kneels in the grass beside a sauna that she and Mikko Merz, her 49-year-old partner in life and work, built eight years ago in the factory town turned artists’ colony of Fiskars, an hour’s drive west from Helsinki. Mattila, 40, doesn’t mention the … Read more
“It was pandemonium,” Maria Tallchief wrote in her memoir about her “Firebird” debut, in 1949. “The theater had turned itself into a football stadium, and the audience was in a frenzy.” The only thing that went wrong was that they hadn’t rehearsed the curtain calls. Tallchief was New York City Ballet’s first star, a thrilling … Read more
In a first for TEFAF Maastricht, visitors to this year’s fair will encounter a booth dedicated entirely to Australia’s First Nations art. The show is set to feature over a dozen artists, working from the 1960s to present day, providing a broad picture of the contemporary Indigenous Australian art movement. The Indigenous people of Australia … Read more