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Vol. LXV, No. 18
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011
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Vol. LXV, No. 18
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011
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 (Photo by Emily Reeves)
STANDING TALL: These young stilt-walkers are anything but stilted as they survey Nassau Street from up on high during Saturday’s annual Communiversity Festival of the Arts. Presented by the Arts Council of Princeton and the students of Princeton University, the event featured over 200 artists, craftspeople, and merchants, as well as live music and entertainment, delectable fare, and a hearty dose of sunshine. Over 35,000 visitors are estimated to have been in attendance.
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The Joint Consolidation and Shared Services Study Commission is gearing up to present recommendations to the public at its town hall meeting on Wednesday, May 11. While discussions and data gathering are ongoing, next week’s meeting will detail an options report, specific recommendations, and allow time for the public to provide input and feedback.
The Princeton Fair Tax Revaluation Group contested the findings of the governing body-appointed Revaluation Commission, which stated in a recently released report that the 2010 property revaluation in Princeton was “difficult to challenge as improper in its methods or unreasonable in its results.” At a public meeting last week, the Fair Tax group questioned assessment methodology and outcomes, analyzed the mitigation efforts put in place, and demanded that a new revaluation be enacted.
Borough Council passed the 2011 budget unanimously at its public meeting last week. The budget weighs in at $25.7 million dollars and represents a zero percent tax increase.
In an election last week, Borough and Township voters approved the Princeton Regional School’s (PRS) proposed operating budget of $73,830,765 for 2011-12.
Thomas Carlyle’s suggestion that “Silence is more eloquent than words,” came to mind in the aftermath of 17-year-old Emma Kate Brunskill’s death last week.
NBC TODAY show anchor Meredith Vieira is reported to have readily agreed to be a featured guest at the Healthy Woman’s Forum scheduled for Wednesday, June 1, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at The Westin Princeton at Forrestal Village. Instead of simply talking at the audience, however, Ms. Vieira will head a lunchtime panel that will include Saturday TODAY show anchor Amy Robach and her husband, actor Andrew Shue; U.S. Department of State Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter; Women’s Health Fellowship founder Kathleen Thomsen; and pain management expert Stephanie Byerly.
Sam Mulroy and his teammates on the Princeton University baseball team weren’t fazed when they got blanked 5-0 last Friday in the first game of a doubleheader to visiting Cornell.
Erin Tochihara has kept busy this spring for the Princeton University women’s lacrosse team.
Kelly Curtis essentially begged her way into the Penn Relays.
‘I am the orchestra! I am the chorus and the conductor as well. My piano sings, broods, flashes, thunders. It rivals the keenest bows in swiftness; it has its own brazen harmonies and can conjure on the evening air its veiled enchantment of insubstantial chords and fairy melodies, just as the orchestra can and without all the paraphernalia …’—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs, from a letter to Franz Liszt (1843)
Speaking as Liszt, an orchestra unto himself, Berlioz offers this word picture of his friend’s musical and personal magnetism as a way of setting off what he, Berlioz, the touring conductor, has to put up with when confronted with the “perplexities” of a strange town and a decimated orchestra (“The first clarinet is ill, the oboe’s wife is in labour, the first violin’s child has the croup, the trombones are on parade …, the tympanist has sprained his wrist, the harp isn’t coming”).
The Richardson Chamber Players paid tribute to a golden age of Parisian chamber music on Sunday afternoon in Richardson Auditorium with a program of two 18th century French composers. Although Jean-Philippe Rameau and Michel Pignolet de Monteclair were contemporaries (and sometimes rivals in their philosophies of music), there was a great deal of variety in their multi-sectional and character filled works. A Chamber Players ensemble of violinist Nancy Wilson, viola da gamba player Vivian Barton Dozor, flutist Colin St. Martin, and harpsichordist Wendy Young presented five of these delightful programmatic works, joined by soprano Martha Elliott for the Monteclair cantatas.