Category: people

Henry Fogel will take over as CEO of the American Symphony Orchestra League when he retires as manager of the Chicago Symphony later this year. As manager of the Chicago orchestra since 1985, Fogel became one of the most influential arts administrators in the United States.

Playwright Vaclav Havel retires this week after 13 years as President of Czechoslovakia and then – after the 1993 secession of Slovakia – of the Czech Republic. “Of all the world’s leaders in our time, Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel have been the most loved and admired. When he took the leadership of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in 1989, and when he moved into the Castle high above Prague as President of the Republic, it seemed that the Czechs and Slovaks were the luckiest people in Europe. And, for a time, the Czechs and Slovaks thought so, too…”

American composer Lou Harrison, died Sunday in a Denny’s in Indiana on his way to a festival of his music at Ohio State University. “Mr. Harrison’s primary contribution to Western music, aside from the sheer beauty of his works, was his wide-ranging, deeply felt connection to the musics of non-Western cultures, Asian especially. He studied in Taiwan and South Korea and was deeply immersed in Javanese music. He built several gamelans, or Indonesian percussion orchestras, spawning a movement that spread through North America (there are some 200 ensembles built in direct emulation of Mr. Harrison’s).”

Harrison “grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, studied music at San Francisco State College, composition with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, and pioneered with John Cage in creating and performing works for percussion ensemble. ‘Lou’s passing is so symbolic of the end of an era. His deep connections to Schoenberg, Ives, Cowell, and Cage made him a real icon, even beyond his own compositional career’.”

UK culture minister Kim Howells has big ideas about art. He wants boldness. He wants imagination. He wants something new. So you might think the art he made himself might be all (or even some) of these things. You’d be wrong. “It turns out that his idea of art, as manifested in the example of his own work sold at a charity auction (to the organiser, a friend) for £60 is disappointingly, or gratifyingly if you want to put the boot in, dull. Dull isn’t the word. This laborious, insipid excuse for a drawing is a piece of middle-class kitsch so lacking in life that it could win the Daily Mail’s competition for ‘real’ art. Howells’ drawing is nerveless and oddly lacking in warmth – the very opposite of his public persona.”

Kevin Spacey has agreed to take an active role in the management of London’s Old Vic Theatre. “The actor, who is already on the board of trustees, is understood to have agreed to spearhead the theatre’s artistic and commercial endeavours. Despite playing host to some of the most celebrated actors, including Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike and Vivien Leigh, the theatre’s rich history has been overshadowed for some time by its lack of funds and desperate need for refurbishment.”

Certainly, no playwright of August Wilson’s generation — he is 57 — has proved as ubiquitous. Every one of his first eight dramas has played in New York, seven of them on Broadway, and collectively they have received nearly 2,000 productions, from amateur companies to regional theaters to London’s Royal National Theater. Mr. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes, been a Pulitzer finalist four other times, and taken seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards.” A new production of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on Broadway seems to bring his career full circle.

Mordichai Richler was a major literary presence in Canada. But his cult fame has grown sionce his death a year and a half ago. “Since his death, at 70, in July, 2001, from complications related to kidney cancer, Richler has continued to be a significant, vibrant presence in Canadian culture. There’s even a type font named after him, for Yaweh’s sake. But it seems we’re going to be hearing, seeing and thinking about him even more if various plans to enhance and heighten his legacy come to fruition in the next five years.”

Richard Bradshaw is conductor and administrator of the Canadian Opera Company. And right now he and his company are “so focused on the new facility that everything – from subscriptions to programming – is calculated around the projected opening of the opera house in the summer of 2006.” So what’s a typical day like, running a big opera company?

In France there’s a campaign to get writer Georges Sand reburied in the Pantheon on the 200th anniversary of her birth. “If Sand joins this Gallic dead white men’s club – one that nevertheless includes a couple of men of color – she would only be the second woman among the 70-odd people buried there to be admitted ‘on her own merits.’ The first was the physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934) who was ‘panthéonized’ in 1995 with her scientist husband Pierre.”