Category: people

John Kim Bell is a successful conductor, an outspoken advocate for the arts, and a Mohawk from aboriginal Quebec. You would think he’d be a role model in the First Nation community, but in fact, the opposite is true. Bell has a habit of being publicly critical of native leadership, and has sparred with national activists on the issues surrounding aboriginal rights. Adding to the controversy is the fact that Bell often makes sweeping pronouncements about what it will take to lift Canada’s native people out of an endless cycle of poverty, contradicting and criticizing native leaders as if he himself had grown up on a reservation and clawed his way to respectability, which he didn’t.

Willard J. Holmes has been named director of Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. “Holmes, 54, is deputy director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. His selection ends a five-month search begun after the surprise resignation of director Kate Sellers in October.”

The husband-and-wife team of soprano Angela Gheorghiu and tenor Roberto Alagna have canceled their remaining performances of “Faust” at the Metropolitan Opera because of the war in Iraq. “They had war concerns and terrorism concerns.”

Has director Wim Wenders hit bottom? Last week he was fired by his own production company. And “looking back over the past decade and then some, the director’s exile from his own business operation seems less an aberration and more the latest bad news in what – the ‘Buena Vista’ movie aside – has been a relentless decline as a cinematic force.”

It’s not that most wealthy supporters of classical music don’t like new and challenging works. It’s just that, well, we all love our Beethoven, don’t we, and so many of these young composers nowadays just insist on writing the most horrid, unlistenable stuff, and who wants to throw their money away on that? Kathryn Gould is an exception to the rule. An amateur musician and devoted lover of new music, she is pumping large amounts of her money into an effort to create a ‘renaissance of new music’ in Northern California. Her efforts will result in multiple high-profile performances of new works by orchestras around the Bay Area, at a time when most organizations are cutting back on commissioning.

Five notable writers will soon have the right to drive sheep through the city’s main street. Liverpool city council formally votes at a special meeting tomorrow to honour Alan Bleasdale, Carla Lane, Willy Russell, Jimmy McGovern and Dame Beryl Bainbridge as freemen of the city. It’s an honorary title, but it does carry the benefit of the sheep thing. And free rides on ferries…

Caroline Michel has just been made managing director and publisher of HarperPress, the literary division of the publishing giant HarperCollins” where she’ll be one of the most powerful women in publishing. “She has long since proved her doubters comprehensively wrong. But her new job will nevertheless demand all her promotional skills and should also test the depths of her seemingly bottomless supplies of optimism. To put it bluntly, the glaring problem with HarperCollins, as far as the bien pensants of British literary life are concerned, is that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch.”

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ career is rolling at high speed. Last year she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama for ‘Topdog/Underdog.’ On May 6, Random House will publish her first novel, ‘Getting Mother’s Body,’ about a family’s quest to dig up the jewelry supposedly buried in the grave of one of its members. The first printing is 100,000 copies.” And her new play? Her new play has a name that ensures no mainstream paper will ever publish the title.

Composer John Adams, at 56, “is now old enough that the major works of his youth and early maturity are coming into focus as bright, certain lights from a confused and confusing time.” Lincoln Center is showcasing Adams with a festival – its first devoted to a living composer. “There will be concerts, films and ballets in four auditoriums as well as the first New York performances of Mr. Adams’s most recent dramatic score, the ebullient Christmas opera-oratorio ‘El Niño,’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Forget about Mostly Mozart: this is Absolutely and Adamantly Adams. The festival should help listeners recognize what makes Mr. Adams’s music so special — and what made it so special right from the first.”

When art critic Robert Hughes goes on trial next month in Australia charged with dangerous driving in a 1999 accident, he won’t be in the courtroom. Instead he’ll attend through a video link from the US. “Hughes’ lawyer proposed the video appearance in January, telling the court it was uncomfortable for Hughes to travel because of injuries suffered in the accident.”