Culture
Basel has a thriving cultural life. (In 1997, it contended to become the "European Capital of Culture", though the honor went instead to Thessaloniki) Basel is the home of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, founded in 1933, a worldwide centre for research on and performance of music from the Medieval through the Baroque eras. Theater Basel presents a busy schedule of plays in addition to being home to the city's opera and ballet companies. Basel is home to the largest orchestra in Switzerland, the Sinfonieorchester Basel. It is also the home of the Kammerorchester Basel, which is recording the complete symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven for the Sony label led by its music director Giovanni Antonini. The baroque orchestras La Cetra and Capriccio Basel are also based in Basel. In May 2004, the fifth European Festival of Youth Choirs (Europäisches Jugendchorfestival, or EJCF) choir festival opened: this Basel tradition started in 1992. Host of this festival is the local Basel Boys Choir.
Read more about this topic: History Of Basel
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The highest end of government is the culture of men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)