Category: people

Acclaimed violinist and part-time conductor Itzhak Perlman will be undergoing rotator cuff surgery at a New York hospital in mid-February. Perlman sustained a torn rotator cuff as a result of years of wear and tear from playing the violin, an injury familiar to many musicians. The procedure is a routine one, but the popular soloist will be out of action for at least three months.

Many though Pavcarotti had sung his last opera performance after canceling two performances of “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera last May. But he’s scheduled another “Tosca” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin next June. The performances are expected to cause a run on tickets, just as they did last May.

American pianist John Browning has died of heart failure. “Mr. Browning maintained an active solo career, if never quite at the most glamorous level, and with the name Cliburn dogging his own in many a review and article. Although he lacked nothing in bravura technique, his pianistic style was reserved, elegant and penetrating, more intellectual than overtly emotional yet eminently approachable.”

“At 41, Wynton Marsalis is the most famous living jazz musician, named in 1996 as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans. While many jazz players have been classically trained, he is rare in straddling both worlds professionally.” Yet he inspires camps of critics as well as admirers. “While friends cite his charm and humility, others find him dogmatic, and worry about the power of his patronage. Marsalis rails against a ‘jazz establishment’ as ‘racist, ignorant and disrespectful of musicians’.”

“Rostropovich is a genuine hero of the Soviet era and what followed, having stuck up publicly for his friend Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the wrath of the Kremlin was upon him, and having flown to Moscow from the West in 1991 to support Boris Yeltsin, who at the time was facing down an attempted coup. He has lived his life as though borders and limits to freedom don’t exist, which hasn’t exempted him from sometimes having to accept that they do. He’s also a human cyclone. Rostropovich turns 75 in March.”

“As an artist, Hirschfeld, who died at 99 on Monday, cared about visual cues: gestures, mannerisms, the way an actress dashed across the stage or cocked her head while he sat in the dark of the theater jotting shorthand impressions to take home and translate into drawings. Call them abstractions of the drama, which became loopy lines, dashes, dots, curlicues and crosshatches. He was a genius at capturing likenesses in a few serendipitous strokes — as good as they got, week after week, since the 1920’s, turning the viewing of his work on this page into an American ritual. But what really separates him from other caricaturists is the vitality and suppleness of his line, an abstract matter.”

“It’s been a long journey for Bill Viola, from the small fringe world of video art in the early 1970s to his current position as one of the most highly regarded artists working in any medium, but his odyssey has always been closely tied to the cutting edge of technology.”

Hilary Rosen is stepping down as head of the Recording Industry Association of America. Rosen has been the industry’s spokesperson in its battle against music downloading. “Rosen’s departure comes as the organization sought to soften its image among Internet consumers, many of whom viewed the RIAA and Rosen personally with antipathy over incessant pressure for crackdowns on sharing digital music over the Internet.”

Hilary Rosen is not as naive as you might imagine. In fact, she believes that MP3s are the format of the future, and spends a good deal of time trying to convince record executives of it. What she and the RIAA have been fighting for is a file-sharing method that upholds the profit margins of the industry by communicating to consumers the basic idea that taking music without paying for it is wrong. “But by moralizing the issue… Rosen and her colleagues have failed to grasp the fact that they’ve already lost. File-sharing has become part of pop culture.”

Back in the 1960s, Thomas Nystrom was the frontman for a nationally known rock band which once opened for the Beatles. These days, Nystrom is a 58-year-old music aficionado who has spent much of his time lately battling colon cancer. But yesterday, the old Minneapolis rocker fulfilled a dream which he swears was every bit as thrilling as opening for the Fab Four. As an audience of friends and relatives clapped, stomped, and cheered, Nystrom mounted a podium at Minneapolis’s Orchestra Hall in full tux and tails, picked up a baton, and led his other favorite band, the Minnesota Orchestra.