Latest news with #Fennessy
Axios
21-04-2025
- Business
- Axios
Audubon's $30M riverfront park and other new projects
Audubon Nature Institute is tearing down the Gov. Nicholls wharf at the edge of the French Quarter to make way for a new $30 million public space along the Mississippi River. Why it matters: The project will create the country's longest contiguous riverfront park, leaders say. The big picture: Audubon leaders hoped to have the park open for Super Bowl LIX, but the project was delayed. Now, the first phase should open by the end of the year with a band shell and public green spaces, says Michael Sawaya, the new CEO and president of Audubon Nature Institute. Once done, the project will create a 2.25-mile walkable and bike-friendly park from Spanish Plaza to Crescent Park. By the numbers: The city is footing half of the bill, with the City Council committing $15 million last year. The rest of the money is coming from Audubon, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and New Orleans & Co., Sawaya says. Catch up quick: The park started during a riverfront development push in 2017, when then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu and others outlined $500 million in projects. Those developments included the now-completed renovation of the World Trade Center into the Four Seasons and the new Canal Street ferry terminal. Audubon's early riverfront ideas included a Ferris wheel and amphitheater, which drew criticism from residents, according to The Times-Picayune. The project has almost doubled in cost since planning started, Sawaya says. Zoom in: Current plans call for it to have open-air structures, a community center, event rental options, a playground, grassy lawns and space for food trucks. The Gov. Nicholls wharf should be torn down in several weeks. The Esplanade wharf is expected to be partly demolished, but Audubon leaders tell us they are still fine-tuning the concept. See the latest proposal. Between the lines: Riverfront parks in Brooklyn, Tampa and Boston have been inspirations for the New Orleans development. More Audubon projects Audubon is also working on a few other projects. Woldenberg Park: The renovations outside the aquarium are expected to wrap up by the end of May, says Jackson Kerby, Audubon's vice president of construction. The new hardscaping, lighting and utility improvements are geared at making it more attractive for special events. Carousel: Audubon lowered the price of its animal carousel after it failed to sell at auction. The zoo is replacing it with a smaller version. Go deeper. New dinosaur exhibit: Work is starting on the Odenheimer rotunda to house a new dinosaur experience, Kerby says. It will showcase the connection with dinosaurs, reptiles and birds. It's the oldest building on the zoo property and was originally Audubon's aquarium. It's next to the reptile house. Construction is expected to begin next year, she says. Giraffe feedings: The zoo recently started allowing guests to pay $5 to hand-feed the new giraffes, Maverick and Fennessy. Go deeper
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dunedin Consort/Butt review – A bog, but not standard as Fennessy's new cantata premieres
In 2006 an early medieval manuscript, the Faddan More Psalter, was discovered in a bog in central Ireland. The collection of psalms on its 60 vellum pages was only partly decipherable, but nevertheless the idea of this precious artefact preserved in peat and mud for more than 1,000 years caught the imagination of David Fennessy, whose half hour-long Bog Cantata, commissioned by the Dunedin Consort, takes the psalter, and the bog in which it was found, as its starting point. Rather than setting the surviving fragments of text from the discovery itself, Fennessy imagined 'a piece of music that had itself been buried for centuries in the bog and dug up', and asked the dramatist Marina Carr for a series of texts that explore the bog and the people who might have lived, died and been preserved within it. Her contributions are spare, laconic and allusive, and Fennessy's treatment of them, sometimes as solo arias, sometimes involving eight singers, is equally economical. The vocal lines often just unfold over sustained pitches from the accompanying baroque ensemble of organ, recorders and strings, which either grumble in the bass or sing in the high treble, though just occasionally the instrumental textures well up into something much darker and more threatening. The result is curiously powerful and direct, timeless in an utterly convincing way. With the exception of a jaw's harp, whose other-worldly twanging colours the opening and closing section of his cantata, the bass-heavy instrumental ensemble that Fennessy employs is identical to that used by Bach for his Actus Tragicus BWV 106, which was one of three baroque pieces that preceded the premiere, all immaculately conducted by John Butt. The fifth of Jan Dismas Zelenka's Lamentations was delivered with dramatic immediacy by tenor Ed Lyon, while soprano Nardus Williams and baritone Roderick Williams made the most of the consoling solo opportunities offered by Telemann's funeral cantata Du aber Daniel, gehe hin. Repeated at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, on 7 March
