Category: people

Booker Prize winner Yann Martel has become famous, and “now has a life which includes arguing his way through forums such as the Hong Kong Literary Festival, because of his novel about a 450 pound tiger in a lifeboat with an Indian teenager, Pi Patel. Pi embraces Hinduism, Christianity and Islam and debunks agnosticism and an excessive reliance on reason, which the novel describes as ‘fool’s gold for the bright’.”

Gideon Toeplitz departed as managing director of the struggling Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra this weekend, and he is not terribly optimistic about the future of the PSO or the industry in general. “I’m concerned that the industry is looking for executives who are primarily fund-raisers and marketers. I’m concerned about that because the passion for music and the knowledge of music is, at best, secondary, or may not be there at all.”

“Janet Collins, prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1950’s and one of a very few black women to become prominent in American classical ballet, died on Wednesday in Fort Worth. She was 86.” Critic John Martin once wrote of her, “She is not self-absorbed, but is dancing completely and wholesouledly for an audience. On the other hand, there is no air of showing off about it, no coyness or coquetry, but only an apparent desire to establish and maintain a communicative contact.”

Henry Fogel has been the president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for nearly two decades, so one might expect the orchestra to put together a good-sized celebration on the occasion of his departure. But John van Rhein thinks that the tribute was a bit much, especially given the CSO’s current fiscal state: “Fogel, lest we forget, is the orchestra’s president, not its music director. I don’t recall Georg Solti being crowned with half as many laurel wreaths when he stepped down in 1991. At last report, Fogel was leaving his successor a $4-$5 million deficit, accumulated under his watch. Good thing the champagne was in plastic glasses.”

The blogger known as Salam Pax, who writes a wildly popular weblog from his home in a suburb of Baghdad, has been given a biweekly column by The Guardian, a London-based daily newspaper. “Salam Pax became a cyber celebrity after his pointed and often humorous accounts of everyday life in Baghdad began circulating on the Internet. His diary mocked both Saddam Hussein’s repressive regime — he called the Iraqi leaders ‘freaks’ — and the U.S. claims of ‘liberating’ Iraq.”

Josh Kosman reflects on composer Luciano Berio: “The great Italian composer, who died Tuesday in Rome at 77, could be every bit as dissonant, structural and fiercely analytical as his comrades, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti and Bruno Maderna. But Berio’s music was also infused with a robust vein of lyricism and beauty that drew directly on the Italian vocal tradition. And just about everything he wrote was shaped in part by a deep love for the masterpieces of the previous four centuries.”

“Although of a completely different sensibility, Luciano Berio was like a musical David Hockney in at least this respect: he was fascinated both by tradition and the old masters as well as by new technology and ideas, and was for ever working both into his own music. If it were not for this curiosity and a profoundly human and lyrical vein, Berio might have become trapped by the dogmas and overtly cerebral ideas that put paid to many less enlightened talents in the 1950s. Instead, Berio marched joyously in his own direction, absorbing a knowledge and love for electronic music but always marrying it to a powerfully emotional message.”

Richard Dyer remembers composer Luciano Berio, who died this week at the age of 77: “While Berio was fond of generic titles – ‘Chorus,’ ‘Symphony,’ ‘Opera’ – his work was anything but generic as he reinvented and revitalized old forms. His music appealed to traditionalists because it carried the past within it; it appealed to the young because of its theatricality and its political conviction; it appealed to the avant-garde because of its tough, original thinking – which always emerged with an Italianate glow.”

“Luciano Berio, a composer whose work included orchestral pieces, electronic experiments, a series of famous works for solo instruments, operas and chamber works, viewed music in the broadest of historical perspectives. He used the phrase “remembering the future” to describe his musical philosophy. He made his name as an avant-gardist and he remained a Modernist throughout his career, but he also saw himself as reinventing the past.”

Over the past 15 years conductor Valery Gergiev has established an extensive international career. “Do you know why I work abroad? Not for money. I have conducted more performances for no money than anyone alive. In Russia, at one point, I conducted for three dollars an opera. I was happy – I could grow, learn leadership, nurture new singers. I conduct abroad to help my company and for my own pleasure. I spend six weeks a year with the Vienna Philharmonic – the best orchestra in the world. If I have no pleasure, I don’t go.”