Kirsten Flagstad was a wonder of nature. At the time of her Met debut on February 2nd, 1935 (a Met broadcast of “Die Walkure”, in which she sang the role of Segliende), she was hailed as the greatest soprano voice ever to appear on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
She ruled the Wagnerian repertoire at the Met until the end of the 1940-1941 season, at which time she returned to Norway to wait out World War II.
When the war ended, she was accused of being pro-Nazi (which she was NOT), and suffered a lot of indignities from which she should have been spared.
Her magnificent voice, however, was, if anything, even grander and more opulent than it was before. It was during these post-war years that these EMI recordings were made in London, directed by Walter Legge, who later went on to make legendary recordings with his wife, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and finally, Maria Callas.
Virtually every item presented in this 2 disc EMI set is extraordinary. This is a wonderful compilation, most of which, of course, comprises Wagner. Flagstad had a massive dramatic soprano that could open floodgates of sound like no soprano until the arrival of Birgit Nilsson.
Both of them stand as the greatest dramatic sopranos of the Twentieth Century. For anyone who wants to know why Kirsten Flagstad is recognized as the legend she truly is, they need this recording.
What is equally amazing is that after she left EMI and retired, she signed an exclusive recording contract with London/Decca, for whom she continued to record (by now in stereo) until she became ill in 1959.
Amazingly enough, her voice, while taking on a more mezzo-like autumnal hue, continued to be a shining and spectacular instrument. London/Decca really need to re-issue these recordings. This was a voice that still resounds, and one which refuses to be forgotten.
— by: L. Mitnick (Chicago, Illinois United States)
Tags: Kirsten Flagstad, Music
Norway enjoys the world’s highest quality of life, while Niger suffers the lowest, a United Nations agency said today, as it released a ranking that highlights the wide disparities in well-being between rich and poor countries.
Canada was listed fourth.
The annual Human Development Index, unveiled in Bangkok by the UN Development Program, takes into account life expectancy, literacy, school enrolment and per capita gross domestic product in 182 countries.
“A child born in Niger can expect to live to just over 50 years, which is 30 years less than a child born in Norway. Furthermore, the differences in per capita income are huge for every dollar earned per person in Niger, US $85 are earned in Norway,” UNDP said.
Canada’s life expectancy was among the highest with a child at birth expecting to live up to 80 years.
Norway was followed by Australia and Iceland on the overall list, which drew on statistics dating from 2007, before Iceland was hit hard by the global economic crisis. Afghanistan and Sierra Leone rounded out the bottom of the ranking. The United States was in 13th place.
NYT
Boats at the harbor at Aker Brygge in Oslo, Norway in May 2009. The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway. With a quirky contrariness as deeply etched in the national character as the thousands of fjords carved into its rugged landscape, Norway has thrived by going its own way.
Trends in the index since 1980 showed an average improvement of 15 per cent in countries’ scores. The greatest long-term improvements have been shown by China, Iran and Nepal, but progress has been concentrated in education and health rather than income, said the agency.
Afghanistan is new to the list this year — reliable statistics were not previously available — but otherwise leaders and laggards are largely the same.
Five countries rose three or more places — China, Colombia, France, Peru and Venezuela — while seven countries dropped more than two places — Belize, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malta and Tonga.
The index was released as part of the UNDP’s annual Human Development Report, which this year highlighted migration. “Most migrants, internal and international, reap gains in the form of higher incomes, better access to education and health and improved prospects for their children,” said the report. “These gains often directly benefit family members who stay behind as well as countries of origin indirectly.”
It also suggested that as the populations age in developed countries, they could benefit from increased migration to boost their work forces.
Through analyzing data taken in 2007, Canada’s migrants were found to account for nearly 20 per cent of the population. The UN agency did caution that encouraging migration should not substitute for “efforts by developing countries to achieve growth and improve human well-being.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canada-ranks-fourth-in-quality-of-life/article1312214/
Tags: norway, norways quality of life
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Gone are the days of “us and them” journalism. The web has led to a news community where ideas and news are shared rather than delivered
The power of the crowd: demonstrators take photographs during the G20 protests. Photograph: Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images
Letting go can sometimes be the hardest thing to do, but for editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger the future of Guardian News and Media depends on it.
The Guardian and Observer, like all other newspapers, used to operate a “tablet of stone” model of journalism in which we controlled the delivery of news and comment to our readers and the only involvement they had was through the carefully controlled letters page.
The development of the internet, and with it the creation of “citizen journalists”, has revolutionised the delivery of information to the point where Rusbridger now sees our journalists and readers as equal partners.
“There was a very clear wall, dividing readers and writers,” said Rusbridger to an in-house meeting of journalists. “A newspaper was something you fired like a mortar over the wall. Sometimes you would get a bit of incoming fire but on the whole they were two separate worlds.
“What we are doing is taking down those bricks, lowering the barrier and positively encouraging the relationship between the two. This gets over the tired argument that this is an either/or battle between old media and bloggers.
“The mutualisation of news is a very powerful idea that particularly works for the Guardian, as our relationship with our readers is very strong. We can use the community of our readers in ways we would not have been able to in the past.”
Rusbridger gives the example of Comment is Free, which has completely changed the conventional model that a newspaper has a small core team of columnists filtering world events through only their eyes. Comment is Free now has nearly 1,000 think pieces a month from a broad range of writers, and comments from many thousands of commentators. Page traffic in May 2009 rose to 9.3m, compared with 7.6m the year before.
Rusbridger says: “It cannot be true that there are only a handful of people worth listening to in the world. Comment is Free is infinitely richer and more diverse and more plural. These bloggers who write for us could have done it very happily on their own, but what we offer them is the influence and the clout and an incredibly interesting audience to commune with.”
Rusbridger says the Guardian should build trust by behaving like the old-style mutual building societies, where members feel involved and where there is a shared interest.
“By continuing to go down this route, we will be more diverse, and genuinely more plural than other media organisations and create a huge external resource. We need to continue breaking down the perceptions of a remote journalist who is a preacher, living distantly, and newspapers as being in bed with power and on the side of power, rather than the reader.
“On our side it means becoming even more transparent and accountable about our sources as well as increased humility. We need to get writers into the mindset where we tell less and listen more, not just in send mode but receive mode, where publishing an article is the beginning of a process and not the end of it.”
Rusbridger believes new applications such as Twitter make it increasingly possible for individual journalists to publish outside the constraints of our newspaper and website and develop direct relationships with communities of readers. He gives the example of Guardian journalist Jemima Kiss, who had more than 12,000 followers on Twitter in June 2009 and uses them to get help in researching stories.
“It’s a journalist’s dream,” says Rusbridger, “because there are all these people out there who can bombard her with all the information she needs. It represents a blurring of the lines between journalism and readers. She says: you help me with researching this story and I will let you know when it is ready.”
The Guardian technology pod had 682,000 followers on Twitter in June 2009, which is nearly twice as large as the number of people who buy the Guardian every day. One example of crowdsourcing was an appeal from the Guardian for help in sifting through the huge amount of data on MPs’ expenses in June 2009. More than 21,000 people took part in gathering facts for the online project and more than 180,000 pages were examined out of a total of 457,153.
Quality of journalism in the digital age
The proliferation of media sets a difficult question of how to manage the quality of our journalism in such a complex environment. Our newspapers have a tight control on information as no story is published until it has gone through several quality checks. But in the world of Twitter, for example, journalists are now publishing information without any monitoring and outside of the Guardian’s own publishing platforms.
On a visit to Norway in June 2009, Alan Rusbridger was asked if he reads all the tweets from journalists before they are published: “I was told that this could not happen in Norway as the editor-in-chief would insist on reading all content,” says Rusbridger. “We are probably ahead of others as we devolve a great deal of responsibility and freedom to our reporters. The idea of journalists publishing directly is not a shocking one for us.
“The way we tend to work is that there are always early adopters of these new technologies, and it works best when individual journalists who have a passion for it, use and explore it. If at some point the technology becomes too large in scale, that is the time to build guidelines. For example, we now have guidelines for Twitter. These are a general common-sense guide rather than being prescriptive.”
Rusbridger says it is important that journalists treat any information coming from the public as a primary source that needs to be checked like everything else. With regard to blogging, he says that Comment is Free has minimal moderating and therefore the quality is much more variable. “In an open forum it would be fatal to start anything that would smack of censorship,” he says. “But we need to have filters that will enable readers to find the best comments.”
Death of Ian Tomlinson
The investigation into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 demonstrations in London was an excellent example of linking traditional journalism with information from the public.
In the days running up to the summit, Guardian journalists had become increasingly concerned by the approach of the police who were talking of relishing the “battle” ahead.
Alan Rusbridger says: “At the heart of this story was reporter Paul Lewis doing what a traditional reporter should do. The death of Tomlinson raised barely a mention in the other media. The official police version was that he died of a heart attack while they were trying to rescue him under a hail of bottles. Lewis was sceptical of the police version and started interviewing the family, retracing the route and raising questions in the paper and on his Twitter feed.
“This is where the power of the crowd comes in. As Lewis began to write, people started looking through their cameras and their mobile phones, and a fund manager from New York realised he had captured the assault on Tomlinson and it was an extremely dramatic piece of film. He did not send it to the regulator, because he put his trust in us, and quite rightly so, for the first thing that happened when we published the film was the regulator turning up at our offices with the City of London police and telling us to take it down. The regulator had until then not been showing any interest in the story, with our reporter doing all the work.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainability/report-mutualisation-citizen-journalism
Tags: journalism, news
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