Anna Netrebko as Leonora in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” in 2014 at the Salzburg Festival, where she first achieved international acclaim. Photograph by Christian Michelides.
In Bernard Taper’s biography of Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, he describes a moment of deprivation during the Russian Revolution that haunts me still: A horse drops dead in the street, and the starving populace rushes out to carve it up.
Historically, the Russian people have careened from one kind of oppression to another, from the czars to the Soviets, whose empire Vladimir Putin is now seeking to reconstitute with his brutal siege of Ukraine.
Read MoreThere were no less than three sexual harassment stories in Tuesday’s New York Times.
A story headlined “300 Strong: Hollywood Women Unite to Fight Harassment” detailed the agenda of the new Time’s Up initiative, which includes a legal defense fund, already backed by $13 million in donations, to protect underprivileged women “from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.” The initiative is also calling for women to turn the Golden Globes’ red carpet Sunday into a bully pulpit as they don basic black to talk about the sexual harassment issue instead of what they’re wearing. ...
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