Category: people

Keith Miller played football for the Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos. But his love of opera has outlasted his football career. “Last fall, he won a full-tuition scholarship to the Academy of Vocal Arts, the prestigious, highly selective, post-graduate incubator for future opera stars. ‘You watch a veteran football player like Jerry Rice make a catch, and he moves with such fluid grace and beauty. Hours and hours of practice and preparation make it look completely effortless. Same thing on the opera stage. A singer opens his mouth and out comes a sound that makes time stand still’.”

New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp has been one of the loudest voices in the debate over what should fill the huge space currently known as Ground Zero. But now, some observers are charging Muschamp with promoting the designs of architects to whom he has close ties. “Critics love to provoke, of course, but with the Ground Zero discussion down to a pair of finalists chosen by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, another question is being asked: Is Mr. Muschamp—long a lightning rod for criticism—getting too cozy with his advocacy? Some within the architectural community think so.”

Ben Heppner is back at The Met, after more than a year of recuperation from health problems that stole his famous voice. Heppner looks great (he’s lost 60 pounds,) feels better, and this week at New York’s famous opera house he gave “a performance greeted by roars of approval from the Met audience and applause from James Levine himself, who put down his baton at one point to join in the ovation.”

Vaclav Havel’s presidency of the Czech Republic has ended. “Awkward and shy, Havel is a curiously natural director. Forty-odd years ago, he started out as a stagehand and a playwright. He was an acolyte of Beckett and Ionesco—the theatre of the absurd. The sense of the absurd extends to his own life. There is surely no modern biography that is more improbable yet dramatically coherent. Havel’s is the rare life, Milan Kundera has written, that resembles a work of art and gives ‘the impression of a perfect compositional unity’.”

Francesco Zambello is an acclaimed director who has worked in the world’s top opera houses. So why is she working for Disney, creating a show for their theme parks? “I’m a populist, an opera evangelist. I believe in making shows that speak to a broad audience. I’m not afraid of the word `entertainment.’ So far the sort of mainstream hit scored by other ‘serious’ directors of opera and drama like Trevor Nunn (with “Cats”), Nicholas Hytner (“Miss Saigon”) and Julie Taymor (“The Lion King”) has eluded Ms. Zambello, and not for lack of trying.”

Nelson Mandela is enjoying a surging art career. He has been making drawings in charcoal and pastel of his time as an inmate at the brutal Robben Island prison. “In just five months, the 84-year-old former South African president and Nobel Peace laureate has sold more than 1,000 lithographs of five drawings. The inspiration for the new career came when art publisher Ross Calder saw Yoko Ono was using John Lennon’s sketches to raise money for charity. He took the idea to Mandela, suggesting he could do the same. ‘I may be artistic, but it’s in the back, far recesses of my mind. It will take a lot to get that out’.”

Playwright Vaclav Havel has stepped down as president of the Czech Republic. So is the country ready for another artist to lead it? Musician Karel Gott, who has topped the Czech charts for much of the last four decades, has been proposed by a group of rock musicians, and he says he’s interested in running for the job.

When the Cleveland Orchestra selected the young phenom Franz Welser-Möst as the man to succeed Christoph von Dohnanyi as music director, some in the orchestral world expressed surprise that the ensemble many consider the best in America would take a chance on a relatively unproven talent. But Welser-Möst is reportedly working out quite well in Cleveland, despite the incredibly heavy workload music directors are expected to take on in this country. “With utter resolve and politeness, Welser-Möst has proved that he sticks to his artistic guns. And he’s delighted to be working with an orchestra that is so open-minded.”

Leslie Fiedler [who died last week at 85] “made his name, in the late ’40s, as a lit-crit prodigy in the grim-faced Cold War literary establishment known today as the New York Intellectuals or “the family.” He could easily have set himself up simply as an Upper West Side sage. He was charismatic and leonine and had the credentials — an outsized oeuvre, ease with languages (Japanese, Italian), lecture gigs all over the world. Crowing was his natural idiom. He was a master of hectoring overstatement…”

“[London’s] Royal Opera House has appointed a woman to its top post for the first time, announcing Tuesday that Dame Judith Mayhew will succeed Sir Colin Southgate when he retires as chairman in August. New Zealand-born Mayhew, currently chairwoman of the University of London’s Birkbeck College, will join the Opera House board next month.” The Opera House is coming off a financially successful run of the Nicholas Maw’s much-discussed operatic adaption of Sophie’s Choice.