Appreciation ~

… All Hail Cate Blanchett - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  I finally viewed Tár on New Year’s Eve. It was worth the wait. Blanchett plays a fictional character named Lydia Tár, a middle-aged American woman who since 2013 has been the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. We open with Tár being interviewed in New York, in front of a stylish audience, by Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker. Gopnick’s introduction is one big giant shameless dose of exposition: Tár, he says, is “one of the most important musical figures of our time.” A graduate of the Curtis Institute, Harvard (where she was Phi Beta Kappa), and the University of Vienna, she’s a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, did several years of “ethnographic field work” in Peru, won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony for her conducting and compositions, and led all of the Big Five U.S. philharmonics (Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York) before landing, in 2013, her current gig in Berlin.