ArtsWatch

Steve Volk, in this month's Philadelphia magazine, takes a look at WHYY's Bill Marrazzo, his very large salary, and how the two relate to each other and don't. One footnote. He reports that the station has no deficit, and while that's true, it does have long-term debt worth noting: $4.2 million of it, according to the station's 2006 IRS form 990.

In literature as in music, some passages just play over and over in your mind until they create a permanent home. Here, for no reason other than its incredible lyricism and the hope that its sense of quiet might be experienced someday soon by troops coming home, is something from Hamlin Garland's The Return of a Private (1891):
"Sunday comes in a Western wheat harvest with such sweet and sudden relaxation to man and beast that it would be holy for that reason, if no other, and Sundays are usually fair in harvest-time. As one goes out into the field in the hot morning sunshine, with no sound abroad save the crickets and the indescribably pleasant silken rustling of the ripened grain, the reaper and the very sheaves in the stubble seem to be resting, dreaming."
Is there a composer in the house?

The Pew Charitable Trusts are giving artists a $10,000 raise. The Pew Fellowships in the Arts will grant individual artists $60,000, up from the previous $50,000. This round, artists in the fields of folk/traditional arts, painting and playwriting are invited to submit. Applications are available soon.

Museums are the place of last resort for art, Inquirer critic Ed Sozanski has written. So true. Which is what make the South Street bridge such an alive experience for looking at art. Without planning, with no encouragement from a foundation or arts group, this bridge between Center City and West Philadelphia (please, no bland "University City" here) has been for years a place for guerilla acts of creativity.
Now, as the city prepares to replace it with something...well, with something else...this large canvas speaks so trenchantly with anti-war art that it's hard to imagine the same experience ever being replicated in a museum, even if someone wanted to export the art, bit by bit, to one of those boring four-walled places people like to go to see art these days. Art is very much about context, and the act of not expecting art and finding it, and of that experience altering your thoughts for the span of the Schuylkill or a day, is powerful.
There is the pink-soldier project that had my seven-year-old and I hunting this weekend for the little figures glued onto the ironwork. They are meant as little tiny signs of war protest. You can find them every 40 feet or so along the south walkway.
A lot of the art is graphically gripping and takes some time if you want to get the full message. A very small portion of it is obscene.
I can't think of another place in Philadelphia that has developed such a strong and organic art experience. Maybe the fact that it'll soon fall to the wrecking ball makes it all the more valuable. I am glad my boy will be able to say that he saw it, and that it made us talk about war. Many of the photos below are by him.

Another departure at the Kimmel Center. Jordan Fiksenbaum, the Kimmel's vp for theatrical presentations, aka Mr. Broadway, is leaving the job to head up marketing and pr in Las Vegas for Cirque du Soleil. He'll consult with the Kimmel for the next six or seven months, he says.
The Kimmel job - discovering new "product" and negotiating its way to the Academy of Music - is an important one. Broadway brought in $4 million for the Kimmel last fiscal year. And that's net.
Said Fiksenbaum, who was brought to Philadelphia by previous president Janice C. Price: "I've liked my time in Philadelphia, and it was a hard decision to make. It was just a different opportunity for me financially and long-term."

A reliable arts lover I know, a housewife from Wilmington, has written to me before about how hard arts groups make it to buy tickets online. And now she writes with two more tales.
"Story 1. I just went on the Kimmel Center web site to buy tickets for the La Scala concert tomorrow. I told it I wanted tickets in the Orchestra. First I asked for "Best Available." It offered only tickets in Row E (one row from the stage) and no other choices. Needless to say, that wasn't what I wanted. When I telephoned I was offered Row L aisle seats. Much better (and obviously available). I took them. What happens to the folks who come on to the site, find one very unattractive option and decided to stay home?
"Story 2 - "I thought I'd like to see OCP's Rigoletto with Matthew Polenzani. I looked on their web site a week or so ago for tickets to the Wednesday night performance. I always look for not the top priced ticket, but the category below that. At OCP that was $135 a ticket! and the seats were less than fabulous. They offered me 2 behind the boxes on the deader right side of the Academy. I passed. Today when I talked to (a friend) who was there Wednesday night, she said that the place was half empty and they were upgrading folks as they came in the door to Orchestra seats.
"What is going on here? The web has to be one of the most important parts of the marketing of classical music tickets. Yet the Kimmel Center's site gives buyers a take or leave choice that probably causes more people to leave it than take it.
As for OCP if they can't sell out Rigoletto (pictured) something is seriously wrong -and I'd say it's the prices."

The orchestra of La Scala Milan played the Kimmel Center Friday night with conductor Riccardo Chailly and tenor Ben Heppner. A review appears in The Inquirer Monday. And don't miss these wonderful shots by Inquirer photographer David M Warren.

Here's my favorite quote from an Oct. 22 New Yorker profile of Metropolitan Opera chief Peter Gelb. Mercedes T. Bass, the philanthropist, recalled how she proposed to her husband that they give $25 million to the Met: "...if you really want to give me a great Christmas present," she said to Sid, "this is what I would like to do." The whole decision, she said, "took about five minutes."
I can think of some other groups that might have been grateful for the stocking-stuffers.

The Philadelphia Theatre Company's new home on South Broad Street opened Sunday, and it seems reasonable to think that both the 365-seat theater and 100-seat black box (not opening until spring) will give the Kimmel's Perelman Theater a run for its money. For one thing, some dance and chamber music groups not able to fill the Perelman's 650 seats might opt for a smaller hall.
And for another, PTC is much cheaper. It plans to rent the larger of its two halls for $10,000 a week. The Perelman can cost $10,000 a pop, requiring groups to nail down substantial philanthropic support for a night in the venue, since even if you can fill 650 seats you can't cover your costs with ticket income.
Some dance groups have already booked PTC, says the theater's Sara Garonzik (photo by The Inquirer's Gerald S. Williams). And we're eager to hear what the acoustic would be for music.

Philadelphia Orchestra music director Christoph Eschenbach and pianist Lang Lang get a taste of what's to come. Here they are in Beijing touring an Olympic site. The Philadelphians - the whole orchestra, that is - will visit Japan, Korea and China for three weeks this May and June, playing, among other works, the Yellow River Concerto. Lang Lang and Eschenbach - they do get around, don't they?
See more photos.
Here is more coverage of Christoph and Lang Lang's excellent adventure.

Can anyone identify this object?
Two clues:
You've seen it for years, but it's now out of context.
It has to do with music.

Photo: Joan Ruggles

The answer to yesterday's Quiz is: The Academy of Music chandelier, which was dis-assembled in June and carted off Gargas (in Provence) to the Mathieu Lustrerie workshop for restoration. Two sharp-eyed ArtsWatch readers got it right. It's part of the central shaft of the chandelier. When it returns next summer, the enormous fixture will look quite different from the way it has appeared since historically insensitive additions and changes were made in the 1950s. The aim, in the words of interior designer John Trosino, is to restore its presence as a "fairy-like fabric of glitter and light." Here, in photos kindly provided by Joan Ruggles, you can see the progress.

Pencil drawings of candle holders from chandeliers of the same period as the Academy chandelier or made by the same company. Unfortunately there is almost no documentation of the plans for the Academy chandelier from the period. Mathieu representative made these flat cut-out silhouettes in wood to show what the candle holders would look like. Wax models of the new arms - made of cast bronze - are being made.

A detail shows several different methods of restoration in order to see which works the best.

The rings that make up the perimeter of the chandelier have been stripped to their base metal, which is bronze. Eventually they will be gold plated. About 15 feet overhead, an iron support with a winch which will be used to hoist up the chandelier when workers start re-assembling it.