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You are here: Home » Arts + Culture + Fashion » Archive » November 2007-3
November 2007-3
French Arts + Culture Archive: November 26-30, 2007
Praise for Biopic of Crippled French Bon Vivant
Los Angeles Times. November 30, 2007
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is Julian Schnabel's deeply affecting film version of the bestselling memoir by French editor and bon vivant Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby is the pleasure-loving former editor of French Elle who was paralysed by a stroke and dictated his memoir by blinking an eye.
> More
Tanglewood’s 2008 Season features Berlioz Opera
Playbill Arts. Nov. 30, 2007
The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced today details of its upcoming
eight-week season at Tanglewood, the orchestra's summer home in Lenox,
Massachusetts. Hallmarks include concert performances of Berlioz's
French opera Les Troyens. Singing are tenor Marcus Haddock (Aeneas),
soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci (Cassandra), mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie
von Otter (Dido), baritone Dwayne Croft (Chorebus), and the Tanglewood
Festival Chorus led by John Oliver.
> More
Singers Triumph in Gluck's Iphigenie at Metropolitan Opera
Washington Post, etc. Nov. 29, 2007
The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gluck’s 1779 French opera
Iphigenie en Tauride, is full of gods and goddesses, human sacrifice,
human rescue, savagery and tenderness. The media praised the cast. The
title role was rendered “magnificently” and “superbly” (New York Times)
by mezzo-soprano Graham, who “loves the French language.” Placido
Domingo was called brave but a bit coarse-voiced as Oreste, and his
French was unintelligible (Washington Post). Critics mildly panned
Stephen Wadsworth's “severe, dark and compelling production”,
especially his taste for distracting dances and unnecessary stage
business (Variety). French conductor Louis Langrée, making his
Metropolitan Opera debut. Was uniformly praised for bringing the
emotional picture into focus.
> More
Renée Fleming Premieres Dutilleux Song Cycle
PlaybillArts. Nov. 29, 2007
Soprano Renée Fleming will give the first US performances of a song
cycle written expressly for her by 91-year-old Henri Dutilleux, the
éminence grise of French composers. With James Levine on the podium,
Fleming will sing the new work, Le Temps l'horloge in Boston and at
Carnegie Hall in New York City. Also on the all-French program are
Debussy's La Mer, excerpts from Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette; and Duparc
songs.
> More
The Death of French Culture
Time. Nov. 29, 2007
Nobody takes culture more seriously than the French. They subsidize it
generously at homeand abroad; they cosset it with quotas and tax
breaks. They decorate artists with fistfuls of medals and honors. There
is just one problem. Worldwide, no one cares. Once admired for the
dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians, France
today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace, beaten by
dynamism of the USA, Britain, and the competing voices of a hundred
other nations.
> More
Beineix's 'Diva' is newly restored
Los Angeles Times. Nov. 28, 2007
American audiences turned French director Jean-Jacques Beineix's quirky
caper flick "Diva" into a hit 25 years ago. "America saved my film,"
says the 61-year-old Beineix. "When the film was released in France [in
1981], it was a total flop." Rialto Pictures, the New York-based
boutique distribution company that rereleases classics and rarities,
has beautifully restored "Diva." The new print will be shown in art
houses across the USA.
> More
Godard says he stole money to finance his films
AFP. Nov. 28, 2007
French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard has confessed that he stole
money to finance his films in an interview with a German newspaper to
be published on Thursday. 'I even stole money from my family to give to
(fellow French director Jacques) Rivette for his first film,” said
Godard, 76, who is due to receive a lifetime achievement award from the
European Film Academy in Berlin on Saturday.
> More
French a dying language in Vietnamese schools
VietNamNet Bridge. Nov. 28, 2007
Students nowadays want to learn only English, which presents an
enormous obstacle to the Ministry of Education and Training’s programme
aimed at increasing French language education within the national
education system. According to the Ben Tre Education and Training
Department, the number of pupils learning French in the 2007-2008
academic year reduced by 1,000, or 16 classes over last year.
> More
Book review: Judith Jones’s The Tenth Muse, My Life in Food
New York Observer. Nov. 28, 2007
A new memoir by the editor who brought us Julia Child’s incomparable
and food-world-shattering Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961).
Joness is one of those lucky Americans whose whimsical jaunt to postwar
Paris exploded a constrained life and changed everything by helping us
learn to taste.
> More
Celebrating Lafayette
New York Times. Nov. 27, 2007
The Marquis de Lafayette’s great-great-great grandson Arnaud Meunier du
Houssoy arrived in New York will attend events in New York,
Philadelphia, Boston and Washington to mark the 250th anniversary of
the birth of the Revolutionary War general, and a major new exhibition
— “French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America”
— recently opened at the New-York Historical Society. He will also be
selling a historic Society of the Cincinnati gold medal once owned by
George Washington, estimated to be worth $4 million to $10 million.
> More
Louvre Treasures Visit Denver
CS Monitor. Nov. 27, 2007
From now through Jan. 6, the Denver Art Museum is showing an exhibition
called "Artisans and Kings: Selected Treasures From the Louvre." The
exhibit has brought art and artifacts from the famous Louvre Museum in
Paris to illustrate how French aristocrats lived during the 17th and
18th centuries under the reigns of kings Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis
XVI.
> More
James Bond Goes Under The Microscope In New French Book
BondNews. Nov. 27, 2007
A new French book “James Bond (2)007 Anatomy of a Popular Myth”
examines anything and everything relating to 007 and ‘l’univers
Bondian’. The authors include university professors, historians,
sociologists, economists, political scientists, philosophers, a
geopolitician and a musicologist.
> More
French trophy for director James Ivory
MovieMaker. Nov. 28, 2007
On November 27, 2007, film director James Ivory was presented with the
Alliance Francaise’s Trophee des Arts in New York. The Trophee pays
tribute to artists who have promoted a better understanding between the
French and American peoples. It is not clear how this fits Ivory: his
films have been resolutely Anglo-American, including adaptations of
Henry James and EM Forster novels. The award text called Ivory “the
most Parisian of all New York filmmakers.”
> More
Met Opera Debuts a New Iphigénie
Met Opera News. Nov. 27, 2007
On Nov. 27, the Metropolitan Opera opens a new production of Gluck's
final French masterpiece, Iphigénie en Tauride. The staging is directed
by Stephen Wadsworth and conducted by French maestro Louis Langrée.
Mezzo Susan Graham sings the role of Iphigénie, whch she has performed
to acclaim in London, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris and Salzburg.
Plácido Domingo sings for the first time the role of Oreste. Tenor Paul
Groves co-stars in this run, through Dec. 22, 2007.
> More
French Lady Firefighters’ Nude Calendar
Ellesdelange. Nov. 28, 2007
The girls of an emergency unit in Carpentras (French Provence) have
issued a calendar in aid of a local 7-year old suffering from multiple
handicaps. Two years ago, male fire fighters from the nearby town of
Bollène stripped for their Dieux du Feu (Gods of Fire) calendar, this
time it’s a dozen female fire fighters, nurses, and a doctor who posed
for charity.
> More
French band Justice: "the saviours of electro"
AFP. Nov. 27, 2007
Paris has produced a new duo of house music heros. Such is the buzz
surrounding Justice, whose debut album has sold 100,000 copies in
France and 300,000 elsewhere in Europe, that the pair have been
labelled the "saviours of electro,” highlighting the thirst in France
for new home-grown electronic music stars, with the nation in waiting
since Daft Punk stormed the world and had everyone talking about the
"French touch" at the end of the 1990s.
> More
Anglophone French bands rock in English
Telegraph. Nov. 27, 2007
France is embracing English as the language of rock after decades of
resisting British and American pop music by imposing a quota system
which forces national radio to play 40 per cent of its songs in French.
Now a host of home-grown Anglophone bands such as Aaron, Cocoon and Hey
Hey My My are taking France by storm, with proper English lyrics
written and sung by the artists themselves. Aaron's album Artificial
Animals Riding on Neverland - all in English bar one track - has sold
200,000 copies.
> More
Boulez; Villain of Modern Music?
Bloomberg. Nov. 26, 2007
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s new book “The Rest Is Noise:
Listening to the 20th Century” has garnered wide critical acclaim. But
for Ross, 21st century classical music’s villain is Pierre Boulez, the
intransigent French ultramodernist who``sniped at almost all of his
contemporaries” and condescending to titans like Stravinsky and
Messiaen. Ross seems to share Morton Feldman's estimate of Boulez's own
impenetrable compositions as "hyperactive chic.''
> More
French Suburban Argot Becomes Main Youth Lingo
Bloomberg. Nov. 26, 2007
France's suburbs have coined a lexicon of their own, a mix of Arabic,
Bambara, English and French that’s lipping out of the ghetto French
suburbs and into the vernacular of mainstream youth through rappers,
singers, and comedians. The trend worries the nation's language
watchdogs.
> More
Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters to Emile Bernard
New York Review of Books. Nov. 26, 2007
The Morgan Library presents a small but intense exhibition centered on
the twenty-two letters written in 1887–1889 by Vincent van Gogh to
Symbolist artist Émile Bernard. John Updike finds the letters form a
blazing witness to Van Gogh’s artistic process and a true testament
of a man possessed by a fresh sense of his vocation in the world.
> More
Le Musée du Fumeur
The Smart Set. Nov. 26, 2007
Smoking will soon be banned from indoor public spaces in Paris. Wander
through the 11th arrondissement of Paris toward the dead celebrities of
Pere Lachaise Cemetery, and there's a decent chance you'll stumble
across a small gallery called "Le Musée du Fumeur” which crams an
eclectic array of international smoking-culture relics into a
650-square-foot storefront near Rue de la Roquette.
> More
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