Category: people

Gibson Kente, 69, one South Africa’s most prominent playwrights, said last week that he has AIDS, “becoming one of only a handful of celebrities to go public about AIDS in the country worst hit by the disease.” Kente helped pioneer theater in South Africa’s black townships during the years of apartheid rule. Why go public? “I have HIV, why not make some use of it?”

Charles Saumarez Smith didn’t get much of a honeymoon as the new director of the UK’s National Gallery. Faced from the outset with questions about his qualifications, and basic sniping over whether he might be ‘too nice’ for the job, Smith is now staring down the barrel of a public relations cannon. His mission: to persuade the Heritage Fund to pony up a sizable chunk of the £29 million he needs to raise to keep a famed Raphael on the gallery’s walls.

The dearth of African-Americans in the classical music business is well-documented, and role models for young black musicians are few and far between. That makes the success of composer Adolphus Hailstork all the more impressive. Not only is Hailstork one of America’s preeminent academic composers, he has made his mark on the industry by basing many of his works on music with great significance to the African-American experience. “When conductors and performers see a well-crafted piece, they not only come back to me but to other black composers as well. When a piece works and I walk onstage in front of a predominantly white audience, I know I’ve changed their world in many ways.”

It’s been a week since soprano Sumi Jo abruptly up and left Australia, abandoning a performance of “Lucia” for Opera Australia without a word. No one at the company has yet heard from her. “Even Jo’s manager, Tony Russo, hasn’t had a phone call explaining her actions. ‘I haven’t spoken to her yet. She took everyone by surprise. I still don’t know what came to pass but she’s not a canceller’.”

Ted Perry was a singular voice in the music business. He founded and ran Hyperion as a small recording label and “modest as it was, Hyperion became a marque of musical conscience, a reproach at the preposterous Classical Brits to the fixed smiles of the bottom-liners and their forgettable novelties. ‘When I first knew him, he was driving a minicab at nights to pay the musicians he recorded by day. The gleam in his eye was an urge to share good music with anyone who might love it – chaps like himself, without social pretensions or academic qualifications, whose grey horizons could be tinted by an exposure to aural glories.”

Who is Daniel Gioia? He’s just taken over as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts after a career as a poet and businessman. “Gioia has successfully straddled the worlds of art and business. He has published poetry and criticism in top literary journals while rising to the position of vice president of marketing for General Foods, where he was responsible for determining how best to market Jell-O.”

Kyle Gann remembers Lou Harrison, who died recently at 85. “The ‘greatest living composer’ label some pasted on him in recent years was an uneasy fit. He was too one-of-a-kind personally, too multifaceted musically. His works contain passages of aimless wandering that are hard to defend to skeptics, yet emblematic of what we love about him: that he relished life and didn’t believe in hurrying.”

Tan Dun is one of the most successful composers of his generation, and recently, he has become one of the most controversial as well. “Some hear the sound of the future in the mingling of East and West and high art and popular culture in his work. Others hear pretentiousness, vulgarity, and cultural opportunism.” The reaction may be somewhat akin to the backlash that greeted singer Paul Simon when he began appropriating African melodies for use in his own American-style folk-rock tunes. The debate is over where the line is drawn between sampling of artistic influences and outright theft of culture.

“Only last fall, the National Rifle Association was beside itself with joy as Michael Bellesiles, the professorial darling of the gun-control crowd, went down in flames after being caught faking his research. Now the proverbial shoe is on the other academic foot: John R. Lott Jr., a point man for the pro-gun set whose resume has noted positions on the faculties of the University of Chicago’s law school, Stanford University and Yale, stands accused of the same scholarly crime.”

So who is Joey Tanenbaum, the art collector who this week announced a massive donation of 211 works of 19th-century art to an Ontario gallery? And what motivates the collector to spend so much of his time and money acquiring such very specific pieces? Well, the short answer is that he’s a gregarious, talkative 71-year-old real estate magnate from Toronto, “a man who loves to tell stories, so it should be no surprise that he has a deep feeling for the narrative power of art, the very quality that relegated the French academic painters to the dust bin of history.”