a southern gal in the north

Urban Outsiders
 Ugly outdoor spaces undergo incredible transformations at the hands of England's popular garden guru, Matt James (aka The City Gardener). James brings his creative ideas and inspiration stateside and proves even the smallest and shabbiest of spaces can become something lush and stylish. Urban Outsiders tackles outdoor transformations from New York to Los Angeles, and does it all with energy, personality and modern flair. The concrete jungle has never looked this cool!

View episodes here

First one aired last week.

Do you have a small, urban yard in need of a transformation?

If you want a piece of outdoor paradise, this could be your opportunity! The host of The City Gardener, Matt James, is coming to America in 2006 to create 26 unique, exciting outdoor spaces for the brand new HGTV series Urban Outsiders.

Starting in April, James will be going coast to coast making gardening dreams a reality. If you live in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, your yard could be next! All you need is a week to spare, a budget from $10,000, some creative ideas and a small-sized yard desperate for a makeover and by summer, you could be the envy of your neighbors.

If you have a backyard that makes you blush and want to do something about it, why not get in touch with the team? For more information, send an e-mail with your location, garden size, current state of the garden, a brief idea of what you'd like to be done, photographs of you and the garden, a paragraph about you and your family plus all your contact details to thecitygardener@twofour.co.uk.

Be On HGTV : Do you have a small, urban yard in need of a transformation? : Home & Garden Television.

The late John Thaw played the popular Inspector Morse

A plaque honouring Inspector Morse has been unveiled at the police station in Oxford where the fictional TV drama character was based.

Colin Dexter, author of the Morse novels, was at St Aldates station on Sunday to formally uncover the tribute.  The Jaguar car used in the TV series by the late actor John Thaw, who played Morse, was at the event.  Also attending were Morse and Lewis, two Thames Valley Police dogs named after the inspector and his sidekick.

Supt Jim Trotman said: “Inspector Morse may have been fictional, however, the link with St Aldates police station is extremely strong and a part of the fabric of the city drawing many people from across the world.  “I am proud to see that the station we work from is not only commemorated in the books and films, but also by the new plaque which will be there for everyone to see. “Long may the enthusiasm in the inspector and his investigations continue. I am only too happy that Oxford is in fact a far, far safer place than in his fictional world.”

Girodet: Romantic Rebel
May 24, 2006–August 27, 2006

This is the first American retrospective devoted to A. L. Girodet-Trioson (1767–1824), a favored but rebellious pupil of Jacques-Louis David. Girodet’s idiosyncratic style fuses David’s Neoclassical ideal with his own prescient Romantic vision. A selection of approximately 100 paintings and works on paper reflects his originality and the diversity of his works, from mythological subjects to portraits and representations of Napoleon’s military triumphs.

The exhibition is supported by The Isaacson-Draper Foundation.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Special Exhibitions: Girodet: Romantic Rebel.

Reviews by MARILYN STASIO
Published: July 9, 2006

BACK off, all you James Lee Burke fans. Aside from a brief, sad coda, there are no on-the-ground views of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripping through Louisiana bayou country in PEGASUS DESCENDING (Simon & Schuster, $26). This Southern regionalist must be saving his biblical wrath and sorrow on that subject for another day. Here, in Burke’s 15th crime novel featuring his roughneck hero Dave Robicheaux, he is still on high ground, writing about crimes whose roots run so deep in old blood feuds and historical race and class hatred, they take on mythic scale.

“I live in a place where Confederate soldiers in ragged uniforms hover on the edge of one’s vision, beckoning from the mist, calling us back into the past,” says Robicheaux, a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, who welcomes these ghosts because they keep him sober and focused.

More than 20 years after the fact, he is still haunted by the death of Dallas Klein, a Vietnam War hero who was mowed down with a shotgun over a gambling debt he owed to a bookie named Whitey Bruxal. Robicheaux was on the scene, but in those days he was a roaring drunk and could neither save his friend nor solve his murder. He finally gets a chance to make restitution when a seductive stranger who shows up in the parish flashing $100 bills from a savings and loan robbery in Mobile turns out to be Klein’s daughter. The detective is convinced she is planning vengeance on her father’s killer and resolves to get to Whitey first, using crimes committed by his son to nail this now virtually untouchable gangster.

Burke has always been in love with the parent-child dynamic, which he applies here in multiple plot combinations until every suspicious death in the area — from the vehicular homicide of a homeless man to the suicide of a cane farmer’s daughter — seems to come down to the same few blood-soaked families. That’s the Southern way, we know; but Burke takes the theme of generational guilt to Homeric levels of tragedy, writing with a kind of drunken rapture about those sins that cycle through the regional heritage, poisoning generations yet unborn.

Robicheaux sees himself as a kind of archetypal hero (the overburdened Atlas comes to mind), and that serves to validate the acts of frenzied violence he’s prone to commit when he gets his hands on a bad guy. But the same heroic impulse also accounts for his gruff tenderness to a black gangbanger who’s being railroaded into taking the fall for the children of the big-time dealers, casino operators and other members of the criminal elite who have bought their way into the ruling social classes. Come the apocalypse, Dave Robicheaux will show them where to go.

Cold Case – New York Times.

Rollin’ with the Entourage
Friday, July 21, 2006
Also on the show: Polish contralto Ewa Podles.

She has one of the most distinctive voices of any opera singer today and has long been an object of cult devotion. She talks about what inspires this devotion, and reveals why New Yorkers will soon be hearing much more of her.

WNYC – Soundcheck: Rollin’ with the Entourage (July 21, 2006).

Profiled in the August 2006 Issue of Opera News from Playbill

The Executives
Plácido Domingo, Washington National Opera and Los Angeles Opera
Anthony Freud, Houston Grand Opera
Richard Gaddes, Santa Fe Opera
Peter Gelb, The Metropolitan Opera
David Gockley, San Francisco Opera
Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera
William Mason, Lyric Opera of Chicago

The Managers
Matthew A. Epstein, Columbia Artists Management
Alec C. Treuhaft, IMG Artists
Ronald Wilford, Columbia Artists Management

The Maestros
James Conlon, Los Angeles Opera
James Levine, The Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony Orchestra
Stephen Lord, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Boston Lyric Opera
Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera

The Diva
Renée Fleming

The Image-Makers
Edgar Vincent, Vincent & Farrell Associates, Inc.
Deborah Voigt, soprano

The Geniuses
John Adams, composer
Peter Sellars, director
Julie Taymor, director and designer

The Phantom
Maria Callas, legend

The Media
The New York Times
60 Minutes
Tim Page, journalist

The Doctor
Evans Mirageas, Cincinnati Opera

and in related news…

F. Paul Driscoll
photo by Beatriz Schiller

“The reason we decided to do this issue now”, says Opera News Editor-in-Chief F. Paul Driscoll about the August 2006 “Power Issue”, featuring the magazine’s list of the 25 most powerful people in opera in the United States, “is that August 1 is when Peter Gelb takes the general manager’s job officially at the Metropolitan Opera. While that represents a changing of the guard at the biggest job in the classical music industry, there are lots of other big changes going on. There’s new management in many other houses, including major companies in Houston and San Francisco as well as dynamic smaller companies such as Atlanta Opera and Madison Opera. And everyone’s talking about the same thing and asking the same questions: What’s the future of the art-form? Where are new audiences going to come from? How are we going to maintain the cultural relevance of opera in the United States? In response to this compelling scenario we made a list of 25 names that represent power in the industry now as the industry looks forward.”

more at Playbill

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Renée Fleming, having suddenly taken ill, has had to pull out of Sunday night’s gala finale of the first Festival del Sole in California’s Napa Valley.

With conductor Stéphane Denève and the Russian National Orchestra, Fleming was scheduled to perform Strauss’s Four Last Songs at the July 23 concert. The program also includes the overture to Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan and Dvorák’s Cello Concerto with soloist Nina Kotova, the festival’s artistic director.

But the concert is going ahead as planned — thanks to quick thinking, generosity and the miracle of modern flight: Christine Brewer will travel directly to the festival following an East Coast performance tomorrow night and step in for the ailing Fleming.

PlaybillArts: News: Ailing Renée Fleming Withdraws From Festival del Sole Finale – And Christine Brewer Jets to the Rescue.

17th Annual Bard Music Festival

FRANZ LISZT AND HIS WORLD

The life, career, and achievement of Franz Liszt (1811–86) serve as a mirror of 19th-century Romanticism. The 17th annual Bard Music Festival explores this fascinating world and offers a broad range of music that reflects various aspects of Liszt’s manifold talents and elusive personality. Each weekend spotlights facets of Liszt’s artistic identity: Liszt the performer, phenomenon, and critic. Liszt the nationalist, teacher, and mystic. Liszt the visionary and experimentalist.

The greatest piano virtuoso of his time, Liszt toured Europe time and again, from remote parts of England to the capitals of Russia. He established the piano recital as we know it today and cultivated a new orchestral genre, the symphonic poem. Most important, he advocated for the future of music and extended his legendary generosity to a broad range of composers and performers, from Mendelssohn and the Schumanns (whose genius he recognized but who were themselves resistant to Liszt’s aesthetic agenda) to Berlioz, Chopin, and Wagner.

The Bard Music Festival examines Liszt’s world and presents representative compositions from all stages of his career. The chamber and orchestral concerts feature works by Liszt, his formative predecessors, leading contemporaries, and passionate followers. Join the Bard Music Festival, and enter the realm of Liszt—a world constructed of salon music, grand opera, virtuoso showpieces, nationalist statements, and mystical meditations.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.

‘Genoveva,’ the Unloved Opera, Gets Another Chance at Bard
By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH

Bard SummerScape, an outgrowth of the unabashedly academic Bard Music Festival, has exhumed the perennial flop “Genoveva,” Robert Schumann’s only opera, for what is billed as its American stage premiere.

Arts – Music – New York Times.