Category: people

Karen Stone is Dallas Opera’s new general director – but she’s largely unknown in American opera. Her career has been in Europe, in England, Germany and Austria. Most recently she’s been running the opera company in Graz. The opera there has a $30 million budget and produces long repertory seasons. Dallas – with a $10 million budget is much smaller. So why leave? “We have huge fixed costs [in Graz], because of the huge amount of employees in the technical department. And we are going through a phase with politicians who are trying to reduce the funding they give us. They want to semi-privatize us. But we don’t have the possibility of seeking funds outside. It’s incredibly dangerous for the future.

A conference debates the work of George Orwell. “Celebrated (and often sanctified) for his antitotalitarian novels ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ Orwell’s reportage in ‘Homage to Catalonia’ and ‘The Road to Wigan Pier,’ and for scores of essays on everything from communism to brewing a proper cup of tea, Orwell succeeded in his stated ambition – ‘to make political writing into an art.’ He was also a writer of dazzling range. As Thomas Cushman, the Wellesley sociology professor who organized the conference, put it, ”There was nothing that he didn’t turn his guns on.’ But at the conference, participants frequently turned their guns on each other…”

The FBI was convinced that composer Aaron Copland was a Communist and spent “two decades and more monitoring Copland’s whereabouts, analyzing his comments and taking note of his friends and associates. The result is an inch-thick FBI file, replete with blacked-out passages, released to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from late 1997. The papers make clear that the government’s interest in Copland did not end with his 1953 testimony at Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist hearings – transcripts of which were released this month.”

Has Ingmar Bergman made his last film? “The last day, the way he was, and the way he said goodbye, he didn’t only say goodbye because the film was over. He said goodbye in a way I knew meant ‘this is the last time I leave a film set as a film director’.”

Director Franco Zeffirelli has been in the biz for 60 years. He’s got a new play opening in London’s West End. “His timetable is punishing, not least because he is 80 and in frail health after near-fatal complications following a hip operation a couple of years ago. He relies on a cane and any available spare arm. Stairs are hazardous…”

“William Lyne must qualify as the most un-Australian Aussie ever to set foot on these shores, which he did nearly 50 years ago. He is a man so self-effacing that he would rather sink into a pothole than be hailed by name across a crowded street. If he has tantrums, nobody has seen them. If he has sulks, they are forever concealed behind an indelible smile. He is the opposite of the “temperamental luvvie” type who is supposed to dominate the arts world. Yet for the past 37 years Lyne has run the greatest chamber-music venue in the world, and run it brilliantly. He has been manager of the Wigmore Hall…”

Salam Pax is back, and none too soon for the Baghdad-based blogger’s legion of fans in the West. Pax, who writes an online diary about life in the Iraqi capital, stopped posting after the U.S. invasion began, causing many to fear the worst. But now, Pax is filling in the gaps in his story, and doesn’t seem overly pleased with his country’s ‘liberation’: “Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don’t let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don’t think about your ‘imminent liberation’ anymore.”

What is the appeal of Daniel Libeskind? The architect chosen to build on the site of the World Trade Center has dazzled some. “It is clear enough why Libeskind?s work, exceptionally thin in range and character, should have endeared itself over the years to his various clients, all of whom inhabit the world of cultural institutions: museums, schools, and foundations. He himself is most at home in that world, and until recently has inhabited it exclusively. He speaks its language. If his designs struck any of his potential clients as dangerously unhinged, reassurance was always at hand in the form of his impeccable institutional credentials, his professorial demeanor, his high-flown patter.”

“Geoffrey Bardon, the artist credited with teaching Australian Aborigines to paint commercially, creating a multimillion-dollar Aboriginal fine art industry, has died aged 62.”

One takes £1 million in banknotes and burns them in an existential statement – an act of art. The other invests in trying to save the beleaguered English National Opera. “Why does Bill Drummond get cult status for burning a million and Martin Smith villain status for giving a million? The answer is simple. Drummond, as a rock hero, appeals to our instinct for anarchy. Martin Smith, and many of his friends, are bankers – or stockbrokers, financial consultants, and the like. They deal in money. To some sections of the arts world, the persona of ‘banker’ is villainous.”