ArtsWatch

The National Constitution Center announced today that Joseph M. Torsella will step down as president and CEO - and soon. Torsella will leave in early 2009 to do the "pursue other interests" thing, the center said.

Claudio Abbado had lots of fans biting their nails a few years ago when his health took a dive. But if his latest contract is to be believed, the widely adored conductor isn't going anywhere. Abbado has extended his deal as music director of the Lucerne Festival by four years - to 2014. "...We still have lots of ongoing projects," Abbado explained.

At its board meeting Thursday, the Kimmel Center elected a new chairman: Roland K. Bullard, president and CEO of FastShip, Inc. He succeeds William P. Hankowsky, chief of Liberty Property Trust, who headed the board for three years. Bullard takes over Jan. 1.
Bigger changes are coming to the leadership of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Kimmel's primary resident. More about that later.

It's 20- to 30-percent off, and it's not a digital photo frame or an alarm clock that projects the time onto your wall. Pennsylvania Ballet is putting The Nutcracker on sale - just today, just on its website. The production is new as of last year, and pretty wonderful in some ways.
I tried to buy my sale tickets at 7:31 a.m. and got this:

We're Sorry!
Your order was not completed due to a technical problem.
Please try again later, or call our box office at 215-893-1999 for assistance.

Of course, it's a web-only sale, so calling doesn't work. Here's wishing you better luck!

Last year's Metropolitan Opera production of Hansel and Gretel is out on DVD. The score by Humperdinck, led by Vladimir Jurowski, is stunning - in turns Wagnerian, menacing and spiritual. And the production by Richard Jones has taken on new meaning in a mere year. It all seemed dark enough at the premiere, but now the poverty and cruelty sneer with added edge. Philip Langridge is the crazed witch - a kind of deranged Dame Edna. It's a DVD very much worth having.
Pictured: the production's take on 13 angels, the perfect wish-granting guardians of our time - chefs.

In case you missed it, Stephan Salisbury writes about how the Cultural Fund's established process for giving grants was violated to send $250,000 to the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The question of whether pooled money for the arts in Philadelphia can distributed fairly is critical, especially if the arts community can ever get its act together to create a dedicated funding source for the arts. Other cities help to underwrite general operating of their cultural groups, and have devised systems to ensure that such funding does not go exclusively to the largest groups.
There's talk - once again - of creating a new arts endowment in the city or pooling foundation resources to gird arts groups for what promises to be a rough spring and summer. But Mayor Nutter's grab for the orchestra hardly fosters confidence that such money could be distributed according to objective guidelines.