Category: people

Friday, November 29, 2002

Beyond Prodigy Midori has spent her adult life trying to live beyond being a child prodigy. “In many ways, she says, she has spent her adult life pushing to create the normalcy she missed as an international child star. Her image as a prodigy was carefully cultivated by those around her. ‘They would tell me things like, ‘You have to say you like classical music, you never listen to anything else’.” Christian Science Monitor 11/29/02

Dumas To Be Moved To Pantheon Alexandre Dumas is one of the most popular French novelists of all time. But he’s not been officially honored. That changes this week when his remains are moved to the Pantheon in Paris. “He will then be laid to rest alongside other French literary greats such as Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.” BBC 11/28/02

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Watts Will Make Full Recovery Pianist Andre Watts has been released from the hospital after suffering a subdural hematoma just before a Nov. 14 concert in California. He’s expected to recover fully and resume performing. “Hemorrhages like these are fatal in 50-60 percent of people. He was in the very fortunate 40 percent of people who make it through the event. The bleeding was on the anterior part of the brain, away from the fine motor area.” Doctors describe Watts as “personable” and “Zen-like” during his hospital stay. Orange County Register 11/27/02

Spano Bows Out In Brooklyn Saying that “the energy and time the Brooklyn Philharmonic deserves are beyond my capacities anymore,” conductor Robert Spano steps down as music director of the orchestra after seven years. Spano has recently renewed his contract leading the Atlanta Symphony and becomes director of the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood next year. “As a highly regarded interpreter of new music in particular, he has been mentioned as a candidate for the podiums of leading world orchestras.” The New York Times 11/27/02

Monday, November 25, 2002

The Best Job In British Art “Norman Rosenthal is the master of the big production. He occupies a unique and enviable role in British art. While other gallery directors find themselves bogged down in bureaucracy, in running an institution, Rosenthal can devote his time to conjuring up the dreamiest exhibitions. His track record is amazing. When he arrived at the Royal Academy 25 years ago, it was a fusty and largely irrelevant institution. Today, it is one of the world’s great exhibition spaces.” The Guardian (UK) 11/25/02

Sunday, November 24, 2002

A Life In Art Since retiring New York collector/dealer Gene Thaw “has made philanthropy something of a second career. The Thaw Charitable Trust, established in 1981, is endowed largely from the sale of a van Gogh painting, The Flowering Garden, a decade ago. A founding member and past president of the Art Dealers Association of America, Mr. Thaw retired from active dealing a decade ago but remains an insider’s insider.” Says the director of the Morgan Library: “Gene’s generosity has been so great that he must be regarded as the single greatest patron of this institution since the death of its founders.” The New York Times 11/24/02

Top Of The Game Brian Stokes Mitchell is at the top of the acting game in New York. “No other actor can match his singing voice. No other singer can claim his acting range or experience. No other man — at least, no one who works in the theater regularly — can say, ‘I want to play Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha’ and bring it about. Mr. Mitchell has reached a rare perch in the American theater: he can make his dreams come true with other people’s money.” The New York Times 11/24/02

The Glenn Gould Of Collecting Last summer Canadian art collector Ken Thomson paid $117 million for a Rubens (or maybe it wasn’t a Rubens, depending on who you ask). This month he announced a gift of $300 million to the Arts Gallery of Ontario. The man’s appetite for things art is voracious. “To describe Ken Thomson as a driven collector is like describing Glenn Gould as a gifted pianist; the words cannot quite do it justice.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/23/02

Lukas Foss At 80 At 80 years old, composer Lukas Foss still commutes weekly from New York to Boston to teach. “Twenty years ago we had this club, the avant garde, and that’s no longer really very functional. Now any style is OK. There was a time when you had to be a `12-tone’ composer to be considered Now that’s not the case. Minimal, aleatoric, 12-tone, these are all just techniques.” Boston Herald 11/24/02

Friday, November 22, 2002

The Work Continues – It’s The Critics Who Change Edward Albee had brilliant success early in his career, but then went through a period where he couldn’t do much right, at least as far as the critics were concerned. Then he was golden again. Albee, 74, maintains that the quality of his writing didn’t much vary during those wilderness years. The only difference was the critical reception. Similarly he was, and still is, driven by the same motives, still irked by the same social faults.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/22/02

Thursday, November 21, 2002

The Death of Higher Literacy? Scholar and cultural critic George Steiner is worried about us. Specifically, he worries that while nearly all of us know how to read a computer manual, very few of us have read The Iliad or Ulysses. Is the modernity of Western life destroying our cultural history? “Every generation loses a little bit of the past, as new poems and novels jostle for attention. But Steiner (like Baudrillard, Sontag and Paglia) believes that the catastrophic forgetfulness that has overtaken the West since the Second World War is a sign that the print culture that sustained us for six centuries is actually dying.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 11/21/02

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

The Re-education of Jonathan Franzen It’s been a year since Jonathan Franzen dissed Oprah and her book club. He says things have changed, but others aren’t so sure. “Franzen has the most dire case of literary status-anxiety that I have ever seen,” says Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic. “He demeans his own seriousness with his flurries of positioning.”Others are more positive. “This is someone whose work is galvanized by his own contradictions, his own warring instincts,” says Henry Finder, editorial director of the New Yorker. Washington Post 11/19/02

Former National Ballet Dancer Dies in Motorcycle Accident William Marri, 33, a former principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, died Saturday after being in a motorcycle accident in New York. Marri had left the National last March to join the cast of the Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp show Movin Out, which recently landed on Broadway. “Marri was riding his motorcycle before an evening performance when he crashed.” Calgary Herald (CP) 11/19/02

Monday, November 18, 2002

The Real Dave Eggers – Who Knows? Dave Eggers has a way of polarizing opinions about him. Is he a brilliant writer, a lone wolf who has gone his own way and eschewed Big Publishing? Or is he a shrewd PR guy who’s figured out how to play the fame game? “Eggers can’t lose: he will either be remembered as one of the leading American writers of the twenty-first century, or as someone who discovered, nurtured and galvanised those who are.” The Observer (UK) 11/17/02

Sunday, November 17, 2002

The Next Great Ballerina: Alina Cojacaru is a genius, or so say the dance cognoscenti who are in the business of slapping such labels on 21-year-old wunderkinds. Genius or not, the Romanian pixie has taken the London ballet scene by storm, and many critics say she already possesses the maturity most great dancers achieve in their thirties, and there appears to be no limit to her potential. The Telegraph (UK) 11/16/02

Thursday October 31

HOW TO WRITE BOOKS AND INFLUENCE GOVERNMENTS: Greek author Vassilis Vassilikos may be the embodiment of the old literary cliche about the pen and the sword. He may just be the only author on earth who can claim that one of his books helped to bring down a military dictatorship. And yet, Vassilikos, who has penned 98 books over a career which spans a half-century, does not get caught up in the power and glory of it all. “I am known as a political writer but I think of myself more as a writer of erotic novels.” Toronto Star 10/31/02

Tuesday October 29

JOHN LAHR REMEMBERS ADOPH GREEN: “He could sing a symphony—or, literally, throw himself into song. Head bobbing, voice croaking, arms pinwheeling, Green whipped himself up until he attained full dervishosity. A sort of prodigy of playfulness, he was unabashed by silliness and quite capable of pursuing frivolity to zany heights. In his version of Flight of the Bumble Bee, for instance, he would start as if he were playing the violin, only to end up flitting and buzzing like the bee.” The New Yorker 10/28/02

Monday October 28

SO WHO IS DANA GIOIA? Nominated by President Bush to be chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is “a writer with a background as a businessman. He is a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush and for his father before that. His poetry is not political. His criticism, essays and reviews are not polemical. Rather, Mr. Gioia appears to be someone with a wide range of artistic and intellectual interests who is passionate about making poetry more accessible to the public. Yes, his essay Can Poetry Matter?, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1991 and then in a collection of his essays, angered academics because he accused them of making poetry an insular enterprise.” The New York Times 10/28/02

MARTEL’S ‘OVERNIGHT’ SUCCESS: Last week Yann Martel won the Booker Prize. Not many had heard of him before that. He got only a $20,000 for Canadian rights to Life of Pi, US$75,000 for US rights and was turned down by five UK publishers before getting $36,000 for the UK rights from a struggling publisher. For four years those advances were his only income. “I could only do it because I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t have a car. I have roommates. I wear second-hand clothes. I have no TV. I have no stereo. My only expenses are my notebooks and my computer.” National Post (Canada) 10/28/02

Sunday October 27

VIDAL SAVAGES BUSH ADMINISTRATION: “America’s most controversial writer, Gore Vidal, has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush’s Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda’s plans. Vidal’s highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled ‘The Enemy Within’ argues that what he calls a ‘Bush junta’ used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.” The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

CAMELOT’S KING PASSES: “Richard Harris, the voluble Irishman who starred as King Arthur in the film version of “Camelot” and more recently played Albus Dumbledore, the wise, magical and benign headmaster in the first Harry Potter movie and its forthcoming sequel, died yesterday in London. He was 72.” The New York Times 10/26/02

BELLESILES RESIGNS FROM EMORY: “Historian Michael A. Bellesiles, author of a controversial 2000 book on gun ownership in early America, resigned from Emory University in Atlanta yesterday after a devastating indictment of his research was made by an outside committee of scholars… Mainstream scholars raised questions [in 2001] about research Bellesiles did into probate records. His credibility problems were compounded when he said that he had lost all of his research notes in a flood at Emory.” Boston Globe 10/26/02

THE NEW WAVE: “Every half century, history rolls at us another wave of composers who will change the way music is heard and played. At the beginning of the 20th century came Debussy and Schoenberg, soon joined by Bartok and Stravinsky. In the 1950’s, those arriving ranged from John Cage to Milton Babbitt. Now it is time for another great sweep, perhaps going in even more diverse directions and prompted from farther out on the periphery. The 20th century’s revolutions were led from Europe and then the United States; now may come the turn of China, Australia and Latin America.” Exhibit A may be Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov. The New York Times 10/27/02

Friday October 25

ADOLPH GREEN, 87: Adolph Green, half of a songwriting team with Betty Comden, has died. “The best Comden and Green lyrics were brash and buoyant, full of quick wit, best exemplified by New York, New York, an exuberant and forthright hymn to their favorite city. Yet even the songwriters’ biggest pop hits – The Party’s Over, Just in Time and Make Someone Happy – were simple, direct and heartfelt.” Nando Times (AP) 10/24/02

• REMEMBERING COMDEN & GREEN: “They represented the ultimate New York chic in a downtown way, with a rollicking playfulness and perhaps just a touch of sweet-yet-sophisticated sadness.” Hartford Courant 10/25/02

Wednesday October 23

HOUELLEBECQ CLEARED BY FRENCH COURT: French writer Michel Houellebecq has been cleared of inciting racial hatred by saying Islam was ‘the stupidest religion’. A panel of three judges in Paris declared that the author was not guilty after he was sued by four Muslim groups. He made the comments in an interview with the literary magazine Lire in 2001. The case was seen as an important battle between free speech and religious conservatism.” BBC 10/23/02

DRABINSKY CHARGED: Theatre producers Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb have been charged with 19 counts of fraud in Toronto arising from the loss of half a billion dollars to his investors. “One thing even his most unforgiving foes would have to admit is that unlike, say, the disgraced executives in the Enron scandal, Drabinsky was never primarily motivated by an appetite for personal wealth. Throughout his spectacular rise and fall at Cineplex Odeon in the 1980s as well as his tragic second act at Livent in the 1990s, it was always clear Drabinsky was chasing a much bigger dream than money.” Toronto Star 10/23/02

THE MAN CHALLENGING COPYRIGHT: Eric Eldred is a quiet, unassuming man. But his case before the US Supreme Court challenging the 1998 copyright extension law could change the course of creative history. “At 59, he is unassuming, shy, and soft-spoken. Yet his passion for publishing on the Internet is unmistakable. He envisions a society in which literacy and democracy are advanced through the online dissemination and discussion of great literature. Literature, he says, should not be ‘locked up in a library and accessible [only] to high priests of academia … People have as much power as a printing press’ in their own computers.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10/25/02

SD GLOBE THEATRE HIRES SPISTO: Louis Spisto has been named executive director of the Globe Theatres in San Diego. Spisto is former exec director of American Ballet Theatre and the Pacific Symphony. “Spisto resigned from ABT under pressure in 2001, after several staff resignations, rocky relations with some board members, and an ousted employee’s claim of sex and age discrimination.”But the Globe says: “The controversy “doesn’t say as much about Lou as it does about that organization, which has a history of dysfunctional situations with its leaders.”
Los Angeles Times 10/23/02

Monday October 21

KEITH JARRETT’S NEW STYLE: Pianist Keith Jarrett became ill six years ago, and during the long rehabilitation when he didn’t play, Jarrett re-evaluated his art. “I didn’t like a lot of my long introductions, and there were lots of things I wasn’t happy with about my touch. My illness gave me an opportunity that very few musicians have, to re-evaluate everything. I wanted to reconnect to the idea of sounding like a horn — a trumpet or saxophone.” The Times (UK) 10/21/02

GREATEST BRITON EVER? Who is the greatest Briton ever? The BBC is taking a poll. Of the finalists, “only three of the top 10 are from the 20th century – John Lennon, Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. Three are scientists or engineers – Brunel, Darwin and Newton – and three are national leaders – Cromwell, Elizabeth I and Churchill.” BBC 10/20/02

Sunday October 20

THE DAVE EGGERS PUZZLE: Dave Eggers’ new book is being self-published and he’s giving away the money earned from it. With the success of his last book he could have done anything he wanted. “He’s so averse to promoting himself that it is the canniest act of self-promotion. He really doesn’t care – really. But that’s hard for anyone in the frenzy business to believe.” Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

RUNNING ON ABOUT RENEE: Renee Fleming is the diva of the moment. She’s a breakout artist who’s fame surpasses the concert hall. “One measure of her special hold on the American public is the constant stream of feature articles that have brought her personal history into the household of anyone who watches television or subscribes to magazines. Her girl-next-door upbringing. Her initial uncertainties in finding her direction as a classical musician. Her seemingly picture-perfect marriage.. The New York Times 10/20/02

Friday October 18

SCHAMA COMES OUT: Simon Schama is the most popular TV historian in Britain, a star who gets recognized on the street. “He is an intellectual superstar, a professor at Columbia in New York, where tickets for his lectures on art history and history are traded by touts. Last year, his colossal popularity helped sales of history books in Britain exceed, for the first time, those of cookery books, and applications to study history at university are increasing.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/18/02

Thursday October 17

BUFORD TO LEAVE NYer EDITOR JOB: Bill Buford, who has been The New Yorker’s fiction editor since 1994, is leaving the job to be the magazine’s European correspondent. “In a way, it’s going from the best editing job in town to the best writing job in town-except it’s not in town.” New York Observer 10/16/02

Wednesday October 16

MORE AMBROSE DEBATE: Some critics felt that obituaries of the historian Stephen Ambrose glossed over reports of his plagiarism, but Tim Rutten detected the opposite bias, singling out the Boston Globe as the most egregious Ambrose-basher, and pointing out that paraphrase (and footnoted paraphrase, at that) is very different from plagiarism. “All synoptic, narrative historians, which is what Ambrose was, paraphrase from other sources. If the standards laid down by his most rabid critics were applied to the four Evangelists, the three Synoptic Gospels would have to be denounced as acts of plagiarism–as would a substantial and revered part of the extant medieval corpus.” Los Angeles Times 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

YOUNG AT HEART: Two weeks ago Simone Young was fired as general director of Opera Australia. But not right away; she’ll stay on running the company until her contract is up next year. Isn’t it awkward working for the people who just fired you? Sure. But in the meantime there are operas to be produced, audiences to be made happy… The Age (Melbourne) 10/15/02

FRIDA FETISH: Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is “currently the height of radical chic, and is likely to be even more in vogue when Julie Taymor’s movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek, opens next year. But it is hard not to feel that there is something distasteful and unhealthy about the way we like our artists – particularly if they are women – to suffer. Would there be half as much interest in Kahlo’s paintings if her life had been half as colourful and tragic?” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

THE HIDDEN AMBROSE: Why did obituaries of author Stephen Ambrose gloss over his plagiarism? “Ambrose’s pilferage was much more than a slip-up in a ‘couple of books.’ As the Weekly Standard, Forbes.com, and New York Times proved in one damning week last January, Ambrose plagiarized all the time.” Slate 10/14/02

Monday October 14

COVENT GARDEN’S NEW MAN: Anthony Pappano is Covent Garden’s new music director. It’s a big and controversial position, the kind of job you have to grow into. But Pappano has confidence. “I think the house feels a new energy because I am always here and going to rehearsals and sort of going at 100 miles per hour all the time. And this opera house has needed that kind of investment.” The New York Times 10/14/02

THE TRUTH ABOUT MARIA: A doctor who treated Maria Callas for dermatomyositis, a degenerative tissue disease, is speaking out about the famed soprano’s illness more than 25 years after her death because, he says, he has been incensed by ongoing portrayals of Callas as a disturbed prima donna who retired from the stage as a result of mental instabilities. The doctor further asserts that the diva’s death in 1977 came not as a result of heartbreak (her husband abandoned her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy) but from a heart attack brought on by her disease. Andante (AP) 10/14/02

DEFINING MOMENT: Connecticut arts leaders were surprised when Kate Sellers resigned as director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art earlier this month in the middle of raising $120 million for an expansion. “Sellers’ walking away from what would have been a career-defining moment, at one of the most pivotal periods in the museum’s 160-year history, makes one wonder what was going on…” Hartford Courant 10/14/02

ARCHER ESCAPES PUNISHMENT: Writer, former MP (and convicted felon) Jeffrey Archer has escaped punishment for breaking prison rules and publishing a diary he wrote while in his cell. “Archer, 62, had his £12-a-day prison earnings stopped for 14 days and was banned from using the prison canteen for two weeks. The punishment was suspended for six months” if Archer doesn’t break the rules again. The Times (UK) 10/11/02

• ARCHER’S BANAL DIARY: What about Archer’s “literary” impressions of prison life? “Completely worthless from the literary point of view, and relentlessly banal in thought, observation and analysis, they are nonetheless revealing: of Lord Archer’s mind and personality rather than of the prison system. And to be privy to Archer’s mind in full cry is a depressing experience indeed.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/14/02
• Previously: LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Sunday October 13

BEVERLY’S BACK: Was it really only six months ago that Beverly Sills resigned her post at the head of New York’s Lincoln Center, following a contentious debate over the complex’s impending expansion and renovation? At the time, Sills said that she was retiring, and wanted to “smell the flowers a little bit.” But apparently the quiet life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be for Sills, 73, who has just accepted the chairmanship of the Metropolitan Opera. The Met is, of course, Lincoln Center’s most powerful tenant, putting Sills smack in the middle of the same debates she so recently bowed out of. The New York Times 10/12/02

STEPHEN AMBROSE, 66: Stephen Ambrose, the eminent historian whose colloquial style made him a bestselling author as well as a respected researcher, has died at the age of 66 after a long battle with lung cancer. Ambrose had lately been battling charges of plagiarism in several of his works. The New York Times (AP) 10/13/02

Thursday October 10

THE RADICALIZATION OF LARRY LESSIG: Lawrence Lessig is taking on the business that controls big entertainment. This week he’s arguing his case before the US Supreme Court. “The entertainment industry, Lessig believes, is locking up old movies, books and songs that long ago should have transcended private ownership and become the property of the people. At stake, he says, is not only our common cultural heritage, but also the freedom that writers and musicians and filmmakers must have to interpret, reinterpret, adapt, borrow, sample, mock, imitate, parody, criticize – the very lifeblood of the creative process. But Lessig doesn’t merely want to free the past. He wants to free the future as well.” Chicago Tribune 10/10/02

THINK OF IT AS A HIGH BUDGET LOVE-IN: Yoko Ono has never shied away from controversy. That much can be agreed upon by all. And Ms. Ono has come a long way from her days staring down the TV cameras while lying naked in a bed with John Lennon. This week, Ono, now a successful artist in her own right, “bestowed the first Lennon Ono Grant for Peace to Israeli Zvi Goldstein and Palestinian Khalil Rabah on Wednesday at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, for their efforts to remain “creative and inspirational” amid the tensions of war.” The grant is US$50,000, and was presented on what would have been Lennon’s 62nd birthday. BBC 10/10/02

Wednesday October 9

BACK TO TELL ABOUT IT: “Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate from Colombia and the foremost author in Latin America, learned in 1999 that he had lymphatic cancer. He promptly cloistered himself with a single-minded pursuit not seen perhaps since he wrote the 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in a little more than a year, his only vice a steady supply of cigarettes provided by his wife, Mercedes.” Now he’s about to release “what may be his most-awaited book, Vivir Para Contarla, or To Live to Tell It.” The New York Times 10/09/02

Tuesday October 8

OHNESORG RESIGNS BERLIN: Deutsche Presse-Agentur is reporting that Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, general manager of the Berlin Philharmonic, will step down from the job January 1, 2003. The orchestra says he’s leaving for personal reasons. Before going to Berlin Ohnesorg had a short and stormy stint running Carnegie Hall in New York. Andante (DPA) 10/08/02

Monday October 7

LEONARDO’S HUMBLE ORIGINS: Was Leonardo da Vinci the son of a Middle Eastern slave. After 25 years of research the director of an Italian museum located near the Leonardo’s birthplace in Tuscany has concluded as much… Discovery 09/26/02

Sunday October 6

LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Friday October 4

20 SHORT YEARS WITHOUT GLENN GOULD: “If you’re reading this at 11: 30 a.m., it is precisely 20 years since Glenn Gould left this life… Gould must be seen as Canada’s greatest contribution to classical music, as his work continues to inspire a seemingly endless stream of books, films, documentaries and miscellaneous other monuments and remembrances in all corners of the world. He once said that be didn’t believe anybody would come to his funeral. Three thousand people did, and every day many thousands more continue to pay homage to the man by listening to his music over and over again.” Ottawa Citizen 10/04/02

WHERE THE SNOBBERY IS: Maurice Sendak’s illustrations are unmistakable, and his drawings for such children’s classics as Where the Wild Things Are made him a legend to generations of young readers. But like so many popular artists before and after him, Sendak has some trouble being taken as a serious artist. “Snobbery is the biggest obstacle to him being recognized as a fine artist,” says Nichols Clark, director of the new Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. “And it’s not just Sendak. There are many illustrators who are far better artists than those who consider themselves fine artists.” The Christian Science Monitor 10/04/02

Thursday October 3

BARENBOIM THE PEACEMAKER: Israeli conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, who has made waves in the Middle East twice in recent months, has co-authored a new book with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said calling for peace in the region. “The book, titled Parallels and Paradoxes, grew out of conversations between the two friends, both prominent cultural figures who first met a decade ago by chance at a London hotel… Last month, [Barenboim] and Said were named the winners of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their efforts toward bringing peace to the Middle East.” Andante (AP) 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

DEUTSCHE OPER DIRECTOR TO QUIT: Deutsche Oper director Udo Zimmermann is quitting the company after his contract expires next July. Zimmermann says he “found himself unable to continue ‘his sophisticated artistic concept in the Deutsche Oper beyond the 2002-3 season,’ in part because of the Berlin’s poor financial condition and the opera’s $1.7 million deficit. Washington Post (AP) 10/02/02

Tuesday October 1

RUSH TO RELEVANCE: Salman Rushdie has, “in the last few years, fallen from vogue, but the events of the world have conspired to prove his enduring relevance. If Rushdie has yet to develop a specific American aesthetic, his career has nevertheless given him a special understanding of the challenges this country is currently facing.” Salon 10/01/02

Monday September 30

POET STANDOFF: Amiri Baraka became the Poet Laureate of New Jersey last month. This month, the governor of New Jersey asked him to resign the job because “a poem he read at a recent poetry festival implies that Israel knew about the Sept. 11 attack in advance. But Mr. Baraka said he would not resign, creating an unusual political quandary. Aides to the governor said he did not have the power to remove Mr. Baraka because Mr. McGreevey had not directly selected him. And a member of the committee of poets and cultural officials who chose Mr. Baraka said that group had no power to remove him either.” The New York Times 09/28/02

SHOWMAN TAKES ON SOUTH BANK: Michael Lynch has just taken the top job at London’s South Bank Center. Who would want this job? “The place has been paralysed for the past decade by planning blight, as five redevelopment schemes have collapsed or dissolved and the fabric has steadily declined along with morale. But Lynch is an optimist: “Look, I think the place is fantastic. I don’t see it as one big problem, I see it as a series of possibilities. Just in terms of its position, it has unique advantages – even the Lincoln Center in New York doesn’t get all its passing traffic.” The Telegraph (UK) 09/30/02

Sunday September 29

RELEARNING HOW TO BE A MASTER: When Oscar Peterson suffered a stroke in 1993, he lost some of the lightning-fast reflexes that had allowed him to play with such velocity and facility. But , “as often happens, adversity had a silver lining: Peterson, whose playing was dismissed by some elites as overly glib, was forced to change. He says he stopped chasing so many notes and began thinking more about melody. He started to pay attention to less obvious elements of the music, altering harmonies ever so slightly, peering deep into the structures of a tune for inspiration. He gradually developed what he considers a whole new approach.” Philadelphia Inquirer 09/29/02

Thursday September 26

MORGAN TO TATE MODERN: “Jessica Morgan, chief curator at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art since 1999, is leaving to take one of the top international jobs in her field: She will be a curator at the Tate Modern in London. Morgan, 33 and a British citizen, leaves Boston in November, after a decade of working in US museums… Her rise in the museum world has been rapid. She trained at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, came to the United States for a fellowship at Yale and another at Harvard, worked as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, then as contemporary curator at the Worcester Art Museum, which she left after a year to take the ICA job.” Boston Globe 09/26/02

Wednesday September 25

WE COULDN’T BE PROUDER: ArtsJournal senior editor and literary scholar Jack Miles is among 24 winners of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships, the so-called “genius awards.” Miles is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A Biography and Christ, which is due out soon in paperback. He is also senior advisor to the president of the Getty. The New York Times 09/25/02

• SECRET SELECTION: Winners never know they’re being considered. “Since everything about the MacArthurs is cloaked in secrecy, only the anecdotal testimony of winners confirms that. The names of those involved in the selection process are closely guarded, too. Several hundred nominators submit names for consideration during rotating two-month windows.” San Francisco Chronicle 09/25/02

Tuesday September 24

A NEW ENEMIES LIST: Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham is one of dozens of Americans – Jimmy Carter, Rep. Maxine Waters, novelist John Edgar Wideman are others – who have been named as “internal threats” to the well-being of the United States by a group headed by former Secretary of Education William Bennett called Americans for Victory Over Terrorism. The group says Lapham and the others have a “blame America first” agenda. San Francisco Chronicle 09/24/02

THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS: After All Things Considered and Morning Edition, Terry Gross’ Fresh Air is the most listened to program on public radio. Its audience has doubled in the past five years. She rarely interviews her guests in person… “I’m alone in a room with my headphones on and a microphone in front of me, talking to someone who’s not even there. So you don’t have to have that public presentation, you could be wearing anything and slouching in your chair and scratching your head. . . . I know that people are listening, but they’re not looking at me, so that element of self-consciousness isn’t there.” The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 09/24/02

Monday September 23

LOOKING FOR THE NEXT BIG THING: Jay Jopling is the man who sold contemporary Britart to the public, introducing Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others. Now, after ten years he’s closing his original gallery and consolidating his four locations into one. Some critics have been saying he’s lost his way in recent years, and the 39-year-old Jopling hopes consolidation of his spaces will help his focus. The Observer (UK) 09/22/02

NOT SUCH A BIG LEAP: When Anna Quindlen went from being a columnist for the New York Times to writing novels, she found that many of her readers were confused by the switch, and viewed the two vocations as opposite ends of the literary spectrum. She disagrees: “The truth is that the best preparation I could have had for a life as a novelist was life as a reporter. At a time when more impressionistic renderings of events were beginning to creep into the news pages, I learned to look always for the telling detail: the Yankees cap, the neon sign in the club window, the striped towel on the deserted beach. Those things that, taken incrementally, make a convincing picture of real life, and maybe get you onto Page 1, too.” The New York Times 09/23/02

NO LONGER A PRESIDENT, ALWAYS A POET: Vaclav Havel, the Czech Republic president who began his public life as a celebrated poet and playwright, shared a New York stage this week with fellow ex-president Bill Clinton and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and offered up “a 1,600-word meditation of self-deprecation and self-doubt read in a sandpapery voice.” Havel will step down from his post in February, but his place in history has long been assured. The New York Times 09/23/02

Sunday September 22

JOAN LITTLEWOOD, 87: “Acclaimed theatre director Joan Littlewood, who broke new ground in stage acting, has died at the age of 87. Born in 1914 Littlewood was one of the most controversial and influential theatre directors and drama teachers of the 20th Century… Radical and outspoken, she was said to have been feared by the authorities, and snubbed by the Arts Council. But for many Littlewood was a woman ahead of her time.” BBC 09/21/02

MELLOWING WITH AGE: “Colin Davis spent years in the ‘amateur wilderness’ and was known for his fiery temperament. He suffered personal and professional upheavals – he once booed his audience from the stage – but went on to find success abroad. At 75 he is now recognised as one of the UK’s finest conductors.” Did the change come with maturity, or with the realization of a sea change in the music world, with power shifting from conductors to musicians? Or did Davis merely decide that all the bombast got in the way of his real mission of making great music come alive? The Guardian (UK) 09/21/02

Friday September 20

BITING THE HAND THAT FAILS TO FEED: Days after press reports surfaced suggesting that Alberto Vilar, opera’s most dedicated and generous patron, would be missing payments on some of his pledges, the Washington Opera has removed his name from its young-artists donor list after a $1 million payment was not made. “Rumors have circulated for months that losses at Vilar’s Amerindo Investment Advisors… would hamper Vilar’s ability to fulfill his philanthropic pledges. Vilar has rescheduled some payments and said in the [New York] Times that in some cases he was ‘not on top of the status of the payments.’ But several large recipients of Vilar’s philanthropy either declined to discuss his giving or confirmed that he was on schedule with payments.” Washington Post 09/20/02

WAS MUNCH A NAZI COLLABORATOR? Like many who lived in France during World War II, conductor Charles Munch (later the distinguished director of the Boston Symphony) claimed to have been aiding the French Underground. But an article in a current Skidmore College publication plants Munch squarely at the center of collaborationist Vichy culture in Paris during the war. ”He was a superstar of the cultural scene of occupied Paris who made the transition without missing a beat to the postwar scene in Boston.” Boston Globe 09/19/02

Thursday September 19

VILAR LATE ON GIFTS: There are reports arts philanthropist Alberto Vilar has fallen behind on promised pledges to arts groups. “Because Mr. Vilar’s Amerindo Technology Fund has decreased by nearly 50 percent each year for the last three years, there has been wide speculation in the arts world that he would default on several of his extravagant pledges to cultural organizations. There is uneasiness in classical music circles, for example, that Mr. Vilar may be late on payments to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Salzburg Music Festival, the Kirov Opera and Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and that he may have failed to pay for the supertitles he had installed at the Vienna State Opera.” The New York Times 09/19/02

• VILAR SAYS PRIVATE FUNDING MODEL IS “NUTS”: Speaking at a conference on philanthropy in Ottawa Canada “the 61-year-old Cuban-American high-tech stock investor surprised his listeners by characterizing the American model of depending on private support for the arts as ‘nuts’.” Toronto Star 09/19/02

HIRST APOLOGIZES: Britartist Damien Hirst has apologized for his comments about 9/11 comparing the attacks on the World Trade Center to art. “”I apologise unreservedly for any upset I have caused, particularly to the families of the victims of the events on that terrible day. I think the idea of looking at the 11 September attacks as an artwork is a very difficult thing to do. But I don’t think artists look at it in a different way.” BBC 09/19/02

Wednesday September 18

BARENBOIM ATTACKED: Conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, in the Middle East giving concerts, was attacked in a restaurant in Jerusalem Tuesday. His attackers called him a “traitor for giving a performance in Ramallah on Tuesday. (His wife responded by throwing vegetables at the activists). There were also reports that right-wing politicians had proposed that Barenboim should be put on trial for entering the occupied territories without permission.” Ha’aretz 09/18/02

Sunday September 15

MUSIC OF THE PEOPLE: Canadian tenor John MacMaster may be the perfect poster child for opera’s newfound popularity among the great unwashed masses. He describes arias as “orgasmic,” insists that there’s nothing in a Mozart score that should be any more vexing to the average concertgoer than the latest Broadway hit, and explains the allure of the form thusly: “You don’t have to understand it. You just have to experience it. We go out there to deal with the most important themes of life and death and fear and loathing and jealousy. You name it and you’ll find it in an opera score.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 09/14/02

Wednesday September 11

HIRST – 9/11 WAS “ART”: Controversial artist Damien Hirst told the BBC yesterday that the attacks on the Pentagon and the Wolrd Trade Center were a work of art. “The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually.” Describing the image of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers as “visually stunning”, he added: “You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America.” The Guardian (UK) 09/11/02

Tuesday September 10

SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED: Darcey Bussell has been a star of London’s Royal Ballet for 13 years. “She received an OBE at 25; she has modelled for Vogue; appeared on French and Saunders; her statue is in Madame Tussaud’s; her painting is in the National Portrait Gallery and, if you look her up on the internet, you’ll find 5,880 websites matching her name.” But what she’d really like to be – is a Bond girl. The Telegraph (UK) 09/10/02

Monday September 9

HAMPTON’S LAST RIDE: Jazz great Lionel Hampton takes a last ride in New York as he gets a New Orleans-style funeral procession through Manhattan – led by Wynton Marsallis and an all star band of colleagues. “Not surprisingly, the spectacle of these splendidly attired musicians wailing their blues-tinged dirges while slowly marching in the middle of the street – oblivious to traffic lights and even to traffic – caused a stir. New Yorkers who had been watching from curbside fell in behind the band. Television crews and newspaper photographers, who had been tipped off that a New Orleans-style parade would unfold on this morning, meanwhile crowded in front of the parade and walked backward, so as to capture the action head-on.” Chicago Tribune 09/09/02

Sunday September 8

BIG IDEAS IN CLEVELAND: Franz Welser-Möst takes over as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra this month, and with that ensemble’s track record, you might think that the new man would be a bit intimidated. But Welser-Möst has some big plans for America’s most unlikely super-orchestra, and he isn’t worried in the least about the public reaction. “One of this orchestra’s many wonderful qualities is the humble attitude. I love that. When you come to conduct, it’s not like they know it all. It’s about the result, the product, not about the prestige… What’s so exciting in Cleveland is when you make programs, people will come. Some programs you couldn’t do in London. Maybe in Vienna. In Berlin, impossible.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 09/08/02

YOU MEAN HE HASN’T BEEN KICKED OUT YET? “Lord Archer, the novelist, jailed for perjury in July 2000, faces expulsion from the House of Lords under proposals for reform of the second chamber to be presented to Parliament next month. Senior members of the cross-party group on Lords reform intend to ensure that Lord Archer is caught retrospectively by a planned bar on peers convicted of a serious criminal offence.” The Telegraph (UK) 09/08/02

Friday September 6

PEACE THROUGH MUSIC? Conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim is an internationalist through and through. “One of the few advantages that the 21st century has over the early 20th and 19th is, he believes, the pluralism of its societies. ‘Human beings have not only the possibility but almost the duty – yes, the duty! – to acquire multiple identities.’ He paddles his arms in a short, expressive backstroke. ‘That’s what globalisation means at its most positive. That you can feel French when you play Debussy, that you feel German when you play Wagner. You do not have to be one thing’.” The Guardian (UK) 09/06/02

VLADO PERLEMUTER, 98: The French pianist studied with Moszkowski and Cortot, gave his first piano recital in 1919 and studied Ravel with the composer himself. “His classes became legendary. His teaching embodied the great qualities of his own playing – an impassioned care for detail and also an architectural vision of each piece as a whole.” The Guardian (UK) 09/06/02

Tuesday September 3

GREAT VIBES: “Lionel Hampton was a defining voice for a generation of musicians who understood that it was possible to entertain without sacrificing one’s quest for inventiveness. And he did so with consummate skill.” Los Angeles Times 09/02/02

Sunday September 1

LIONEL HAMPTON, 94: It’s a good bet that, absent Lionel Hampton, the world would never have come to think of vibraphone as a great jazz instrument. But Hampton, who “until recently continued to tour the world with his own immensely popular big band, was an extremely important figure in American music, not only as an entertainer and an improvising musician in jazz, but also because his band helped usher in rock ‘n’ roll.” Hampton died in a New York hospital this weekend. The New York Times 09/01/02

GLIMPSES OF THE POET’S WORLD: A collection of letters, photographs and poems belonging to the American poet Carl Sandburg sold at auction this week for better than $80,000. The contents of the collection, which was owned by one of the poet’s closest friends, are fascinating scholars, who say some of the pieces provide further insight into Sandburg’s dalliances with espionage, his connection (however slight) to Soviet communists, and his decision to support FDR after considering a presidential run of his own in 1940. Chicago Tribune 08/31/02

Wednesday August 28

GANGING UP ON JK ROWLING (AND OTHER STORIES): Author JK Rowling is celebrated for her rags-to-riches story – that she wrote the first Harry Potter book in a coffee shop while on welfare. It’s a classic tale – “too good, it turns out. Yes, Rowling was a single mother with a bad marriage behind her, and yes, she was briefly on the dole. But the coffee shop was owned by her brother-in-law and Rowling was never far from her middle-class origins.” The Age (Melbourne) 08/28/02

Tuesday August 27

BACK AND NO LESS PASSIONATE: Playwright Harold Pinter is 71 and has just come through a fight with esophageal cancer. “I found myself in a very dark world which was impossible to interpret. I could not work it out. I was somewhere else, another place altogether, not very pleasant. It is like being plunged into an ocean in which you can’t swim. You have no idea how to get out of it. You simply float about, bob about, hit terrible waves. It is all very dark, really. The thing is: here I am.” The Guardian (UK) 08/26/02

WILLIAM WARFIELD, 82: Bass-baritone William Warfield, best known for his stirring performances of Porgy in Porgy and Bess, has died in Chicago, after complications due to a broken neck suffered last month. He was 82. The New York Times 08/27/02

Monday August 26

DOROTHY HEWETT, 79: Yesterday morning, Australian literature lost, if not one of its saints, than one of its most cherished and authentic larrikins, when Hewett, poet, playwright and novelist, died, aged 79. The Age (Melbourne) 08/26/02

• A GREAT AUSTRALIAN: “Dorothy was one of the most inspirational women I know. A great writer and poet with a lifelong commitment to her craft, she never lost her passion for social justice or her courage in supporting left-wing causes. Her sardonic irreverence, intellect, honesty, warm heart, her encyclopedic knowledge of Australian literature and history were some of the qualities that made her a formidable friend, a wonderfully talented writer and a great Australian.” Sydney Morning Herald 08/26/02

RATTLE SOUNDS OFF: Conductor Simon Rattle has sounded off about British culture in an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit. “About to take up his post as director of the Berlin Philharmonic, [Rattle] has had it with the caterwauling crudities and street-trash vulgarities of British culture. He much prefers the high cultural seriousness of Germany with its great, well-funded orchestras and modernist-minded public. Finally he will be free of those Hogarthian urchins and sluts he singles out as the image of all that is philistine and glib in the arts in Britain – the Britart generation, “artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the others. I believe that much of this English, very biographically oriented art is bullshit.” The Guardian (UK) 08/26/02

Sunday August 25

TOO MUCH PERCUSSION: Composer Ned Rorem has always been an outspoken contrarian. As he turns 80, none of that public persona has changed. “The quality of his recent output suggests that these pieces are likely to be those for which he’s most remembered. Yet Rorem wonders if it matters: ‘I feel we’ve got about 10 more years and the whole world will blow up,’ he said one recent afternoon, sitting in a park here. ‘Or at best, we’ll end up loving each other in the most mediocre way, and the music you and I like will be in the remote past’.” Philadelphia Inquirer 08/25/02

Wednesday August 21

ONE HELLUVA PRISON CAREER SO FAR: Jail isn’t turning out too bad for Jeffrey Archer, the disgraced novelist and former MP, currently serving a four year prison term. Last week he signed a three book deal work millions of pounds. Now he’s got himself a new day job – working at a theatre in the town of Lincoln. He started this week, and drove himself to his work-release job in his BMW. “It is still being discussed what he is doing but he will not be writing plays for the theatre.” The Guardian (UK) 08/20/02

• Previously: QUIET TIME TO WRITE: Prison hasn’t slowed down author Jeffrey Archer. This week he “signed a three-book deal with Macmillan/St. Martin’s reportedly worth millions of pounds – from his jail cell, where he is doing four years for lying on the stand. His agent told the press that, because Archer has ‘never been writing better,’ he jokes that he’s leading a campaign to keep him inside.” San Francisco Chronicle 08/17/02

Tuesday August 20

ONE PAUL FOR ANOTHER: The Kennedy Center has replaced Paul McCartney with Paul Simon as a recipient of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors. “The unusual substitution was prompted by McCartney’s notice to center officials late last week that a personal obligation would keep him from attending the gala weekend in December. Attendance is mandatory at all events, from the tribute program to the White House reception. This was the first time any of the nearly 130 honorees had ever withdrawn after the official public announcement.” Washington Post 08/20/02

Monday August 19

WRITING OVER REWARDS: Charles Webb had a big success with his novel The Graduate back in 1962. “With its subversive rejection of materialism and middle-class mores, The Graduate captured the nascent mood of rebellion that was to sweep through the 1960s. But somewhere along the way, Webb’s urge to write was swamped by his urge to reject material rewards and disappear. They were set for life. They found this oppressive.” So Webb and his wife gave away all their money to live in poverty… The Age (Melbourne) 08/19/02

Sunday August 18

MCCARTNEY OUT: Paul McCartney has pulled out of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, citing a schedule conflict. “The withdrawal, the first in the history of the awards, is a deep disappointment to organizers, who had striven to put together a particularly impressive roster of talent for what will be the 25th anniversary of the ceremony, scheduled for Dec. 8.” Washington Post 08/17/02

Friday August 16

LARRY RIVERS, 78: The “irreverent proto-Pop painter and sculptor, jazz saxophonist, writer, poet, teacher and sometime actor and filmmaker” died of cancer. “He helped change the course of American art in the 1950’s and 60’s, but his virtues as an artist always seemed inextricably bound up with his vices, the combination producing work that could be by turns exhilarating and appalling.” The New York Times 08/16/02

GO WEST: Cornel West has had a difficult year. Cancer, marital problems, and controversy at Harvard that pushed him to leave for Princeton. Through it all, West has kept his own style – He “does not do e-mail. He doesn’t have a cell phone. He doesn’t own a computer. What he writes, he writes longhand. He’s eccentric that way or, as he puts it, ‘old school’ That, too, is why he wears those dark, formal three-piece suits with the vest chain dangling: They conjure the dignity, confidence and humility of the black preachers of his youth.” Washington Post 08/11/02

ACTING SENATOR: US Senator Fred Thompson is retiring from the Senate. He’s negotiating to join the cast of the TV drama Law & Order this fall. “Thompson, the first sitting senator to have a lead role in a TV series, is slated to play a newly named district attorney and boss of Executive Assistant DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Assistant DA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm).” Washington Post 08/16/02

Thursday August 15

ALBERTO IN LOVE: Alberto Vilar has given $250 million to the arts, and his passion for opera projects is high. But after a difficult surgery and a new fiancee, “he looks on the arts now with a warier eye and to his own happiness as a higher priority.” Will marriage slow down his gifts to favored music projects? London Evening Standard 08/14/02

Wednesday August 14

SETTING A STANDARD FOR SHAW: In 23 seasons Christopher Newton made Ontario’s Shaw Festival “one of the world’s great repertory theatres.” Now he’s retiring. Toronto Star 08/14/02

THROWING YOURSELF INTO YOUR WORK: “Just before he died, the man who made the Frisbee soar and who was called the father of disc golf said he wanted his ashes to be mixed into new copies of the famous plastic flying disc. And his family hopes these limited-edition Frisbees could be sold to help fund a museum in his honor.” San Francisco Chronicle 08/14/02

Tuesday August 13

THE MUSICIANS’ MUSICIAN: “Mariss Jansons may not be the most famous maestro on the block. For one thing, his career progression — from Riga to Munich via hard-slog jobs in Cardiff, Oslo and Pittsburgh — suggests a man almost pathologically averse to basking in the limelight of the world’s top musical capitals. But Jansons, who turns 60 next year, is surely the ‘musicians’ musician’, par excellence. Orchestras revere him for three reasons. He is genuine. He is genial. And he is a genius.” The Times (UK) 08/13/02

Thursday August 8

THE PIANIST WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING: Robert Levin may just be the most well-rounded musician in the world. He is 54 years old, and to date, he has been a professor at Harvard, an international music lecturer, one of the world’s preeminent early music scholars, an accomplished performer of music from all eras, and the author of a new completion of Mozart’s unfinished Requiem which many consider far superior to the original. Why such dizzying diversity? “If you are a chef, and everything you serve — French, Italian, Thai — tastes the same, you probably aren’t a very good chef,” he says. The New York Times 08/08/02

Wednesday August 7

CENSOR’S SENTENCE: “One of Turkey’s most famous film actresses, Lale Mansur, could face a 15-year prison sentence because of her outspoken views on the country’s censorship laws. Mansur, who was Istanbul State Opera’s longest-serving prima ballerina before taking up acting, has already received a suspended five-year sentence under Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws. She now faces new trials, along with several other artists, relating to the publication of books by banned authors.” BBC 08/07/02

SCHAMA SIGNS RECORD DEAL: Simon Schama has signed a £3 million book/TV deal for a series focusing on Anglo-American relations. “The book deal from HarperCollins for the non-UK rights to Mr Schama’s books is worth £2 million, thought to be the single biggest advance ever paid for history titles. The BBC, which is paying the remaining £1 million for the British rights to the books and to the two television series, said it thought Prof Schama was worth ‘every penny’.” The Telegraph (UK) 08/04/02

PREVIN/MUTTER: Conductor Andre Previn and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter have married; it’s Previn’s fifth marriage, Mutter’s second. “The couple, despite their differences in age – he is 72 and she is 39 – have become inseparable over recent months after her performance in Boston of The Previn Violin Concerto, which he composed for her.” The Telegraph (UK) 08/06/02

Tuesday August 6

WHY I GIVE: Arts patron Alberto Vilar’s fortune has dipped from $5.5 billion to $1.6 billion. But he’s still giving money for the arts, and he’s annoyed at reports he meddles with the productions he finances. “Let me tell you the way this works. You come to me, the head of the Met, the Kirov, and you say, we’re going to do War and Peace and Joe is going to direct it and Joe is going to be the conductor and here are the singers. We have a gentleman’s code; I simply say pass or fail, yes or no. If you call that meddling, I’ll be happy to be called a meddler any day.” Denver Post 08/04/02

DANCE PIONEER DIES: Freidann Parker, co-founder of the Colorado Ballet, has died at the age of 77. Parker and her lifelong business associate and companion, Lillian Covillo, established the Colorado Concert Ballet in 1961 and saw it through a number of incarnations. Today, the Colorado Ballet has a company roster of 30 professional dancers and 30 apprentices. Denver Post 08/06/02

Monday August 5

FAMILY AFFAIR: Sutton and Hunter Foster are the biggest family story on Broadway since the Lupones. “She’s the Tony Award-winning singer-actor-dancer who’s gone from virtually unknown Millie to Thoroughly Modern Millie. He’s the naive but stouthearted hero Bobby Strong in Urinetown: The Musical.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 08/04/02

Sunday August 4

MILLER THE IRONIC: One doesn’t tend to think of Arthur Miller as an author of hilarious satire – he’s generally perceived as being darker than a festival of film noir drenched in motor oil. So its no great surprise that he would choose a relatively remote location to try his hand at comedy. Miller’s latest play combines crucifixion and commercialism in what Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater hopes will be an attention-getting progression in the career of America’s arguably most famous playwright. The Star Tribune (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 08/04/02

Friday August 2

TEACHING WRITING IN THE BACK OF A PIRATE STORE: Dave Eggers’ writing career is well established. But these days he’s spending most of his time running and supporting a writing program for kids in San Francisco’s Mission District. “Open just a couple of months, 826 Valencia is starting to buzz with young people who have heard about the space through word of mouth. They come for the free tutoring and workshops, but often are lured in by the sweetly twisted Disneyland that is the pirate supply store, with its strange little dioramas and hidden trapdoors.” San Francisco Chronicle 08/02/02

TOLSTOY GATHERING: It’s being billed as the largest-ever gathering of descendants of novelist Leo Tolstoy. “About 90 of 300 known Tolstoy relatives — from Russia, Europe and the United States — will take a train today from Moscow to the writer’s estate, 200 kilometres south of Moscow, said the author’s great-great-grandson Vladimir Tolstoy.” Toronto Star (AP) 08/02/02

Thursday August 1

DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200: Former Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman, who was convicted on charges of conspiracy and price-fixing this spring, reported to a Midwest prison this week to begin serving his one-year sentence. Taubman, who is 78, was also fined $7.5 million by the court for his part in the price-fixing scheme, which sparked outrage throughout the art world, and led to much scrutiny for the top auction houses in the U.S. and Britain. Nando Times (AP) 07/31/02

Wednesday July 24

CHAIM POTOK, 73: Novelist Chaim Potok, who had been ill with cancer for some time, died at his home in Pennsylvania Tuesday. “Mr. Potok came to international prominence in 1967 with his debut novel, The Chosen (Simon & Schuster). Unlike the work of the novelists Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, which dealt largely with the neuroses of assimilated secular Jews, The Chosen was the first American novel to make the fervent, insular Hasidic world visible to a wide audience.” The New York Times 07/24/02

NEW DIRECTION: “The National Museum of Women in the Arts announced its fifth director in as many years yesterday, naming American art scholar Judy L. Larson to the post. Larson is a former curator at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and has been executive director of the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke since 1998. The NMWA job has been vacant since October, when Ellen Reeder resigned after three months. Larson will assume her duties in September.” Washington Post 07/24/02

Tuesday July 23

ALL ABOUT THE STORIES: At 36, David McVicar is “widely ranked the hottest talent on the international opera circuit; and his special genius is for telling stories on a big scale but with clarity and focus. At a time when opera staging seems in danger of abandoning narrative responsibility in favour of interpretative fancy – the bourgeois-battering aesthetic of Figaros set on futuristic rubbish dumps and Don Giovannis on a slip-road to the M6 – McVicar has emerged as something like a champion of old-fashioned values.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/23/02

Sunday July 21

NOT ALL RICH PEOPLE ARE JERKS: “Eli Broad is one of the richest people in America: His $5.2 billion fortune places him at No. 51 on this year’s Forbes magazine list. He is also one of the nation’s most charitable individuals: The Chronicle of Philanthropy ranked him No. 5 last year, when he gave away more than $387 million. And he’s one of the world’s greatest art collectors: The current Artnews list puts him in the top 10. Another collector might build a Broad Museum. But this entrepreneur, who gives far more to public school causes than he spends on art, has instead created a ”lending library” of the contemporary work that is his focus.” Boston Globe 07/21/02

SEYMOUR SOLOMON, 80: “Seymour Solomon, who with his brother, Maynard, founded Vanguard Records in 1950 and turned it into the dominant label for American folk music, recording such artists as Joan Baez, Odetta, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Ian & Sylvia, died yesterday at his summer home in Lenox, Mass.” The New York Times 07/20/02

ALAN LOMAX, 87: “Alan Lomax, the celebrated musicologist who helped preserve America’s and the world’s heritage by making thousands of recordings of folk, blues and jazz musicians from the 1930s onward, died Friday in Florida. He was 87.” Calgary Herald 07/21/02

RESTLESS IN PORTLAND: Some people just aren’t meant to stay in one place for too long. Such was the case last winter when James Canfield, the 42-year-old Joffrey alum and choreographer of the Oregon Ballet Theater, called his most senior dancers to his office and announced to them his intention to step down from the company. Canfield has built the OBT into one of the nation’s respected ballet troupes, and was certainly facing no pressure to move on, but he described a restlessness that has become a familiar theme in his professional life, one that has almost always resulted in a career move. What’s next for Canfield is uncertain, but there is no doubt that there will be a next. The New York Times 07/21/02

POTS AND KETTLES AND THE LITTLE TRAMP: A cynic might be forgiven for asking where a bunch of folks with the questionable moral history of the British royal family gets off making value judgments on the personal lives of others, but new documents demonstrate that the royals blocked Charlie Chaplin from knighthood for decades after controversial aspects of his personal life surfaced. Chaplin’s marriages to underage teenagers and open membership in the Communist party in the age of the blacklist kept him from knighthood for nearly a quarter century. BBC 07/21/02

Friday July 19

AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST DANCER: Russell Page was only 33 when he died suddenly this week. Thursday he was eulogized as “perhaps the most talented dancer Australia has produced, skilled in both the old traditional dances and contemporary forms.” A fiery principal dance with Bangarra Dance Theatre “Page was an amateur daredevil and a truly ‘deadly’footballer, often sneaking off from dance practice to play touch footy with Redfern’s street kids.” Sydney Morning Herald 07/19/02

LOOKING TOWARDS HOME: James Conlon is that rarest of all musical beasts: an American conductor with a global profile and the trust of European musicians. Conlon, who left America for Europe two decades ago after surmising that American orchestras do not like to hire American music directors, is looking to come home as his tenure in Cologne and Paris comes to an end. Rumor has him at the top of the list of candidates to succeed Christoph Eschenbach as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s summer festival at Ravinia, but Conlon is likely to have many options for employment the minute he makes his return to America official. Chicago Sun-Times 07/18/02

Thursday July 18

BILBAO-ON-HIDSON CHOOSES DIRECTOR: Jonathan Levi has been chosen as director of the new $62 million Bard Performing Arts Center. The center, designed by Frank Gehry, “is to be completed in January and open in April as a home for music, theater and dance. The building’s two theaters will be used both for academic purposes and as a public space for international cultural events. Like the Guggenheim Museum that Mr. Gehry designed in Bilbao, Spain, the Bard center is highly distinctive with a series of low-lying steel canopies that look like large, overlapping ribbons.” The New York Times 07/18/02

Tuesday July 16

NOT PRODUCING: Henry Goodman was the victim of one of the most public firings in Broadway history when he was removed as Nathan Lane’s replacement in The Producers last spring. So what happened? “Personally, I think they blew it. Of course they’d say, ‘No, no Henry, you blew it’. I just wanted the freedom to deepen my character, make him darker, more like Zero Mostel (who played the part in the original 1968 film). Just look at these letters” — he chucks down a sheaf of fan mail — “the bookings were fine. The fact is, 60,000 people saw me and no one asked for their money back. But they wanted a clone of Nathan and I wasn’t prepared to give them that.” The Times (UK) 07/16/02

Monday July 15

YOUSUF KARSH, 93: The Canadian photographer died in Boston of complications resulting from an operation for diverticulitis. “The formal portrait photographer, whose lens captured the who’s-who of the 20th century, sold or donated all 355,000 of his negatives to the National Archives in Ottawa and they will form the core collection of the Portrait Gallery of Canada, which is to open in 2005 across the street from Parliament Hill.” Toronto Star 07/15/02

CHOREOGRAPHER KILLED: Noted Russian choreographer Yevgeny Panifilov was found stabbed to death in his apartment. “Panfilov, 47, became popular in the early 1980s when he was among the first to create a Russian modern dance group. He was particularly well known for his choreography of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, which has been performed in major Russian theaters and around the world under his direction.” Nando Times (AP) 07/15/02

Sunday July 14

GONE NATIVE: The arts world and the larger capitalistic society understandably view one another with skepticism, and sometimes outright hostlity, and the best way to make an artist nervous is to put a businessman in charge of his fiscal affairs. Such was the case when Gerry Robinson was persuaded to take on the leadership of the Arts Council of England, with the hope being that he could use his business savvy to streamline the council’s operations. Four years in, Robinson has done just that, but the council appears to have had as much impact on him as he has had on it: “Like many arts ministers and Arts Council chairmen before him, Robinson has gone native, and is quite prepared to admit the fact. He now talks the arts talk with total conviction, effortlessly embracing both the social importance of the arts… and the pursuit of excellence.” Financial Times 07/12/02

LIBESKIND SPEAKS: The architect of the new Jewish Museum in Berlin explains his vision of what makes for good architecture in the modern world. “Buildings provide spaces for living, but are also de facto instruments, giving shape to the sound of the world. Music and architecture are related not only by metaphor, but also through concrete space.” The Guardian (UK) 07/13/02

A GROUNDBREAKER LOOKS BACK: James DePriest faced more than the average number of roadblocks to becoming a successful conductor. He has polio, and must walk with braces and canes. He has kidney disease, and required a transplant last year. And he is black, which is still a shockingly rare thing to be in the world of classical music. Nonetheless, DePriest has achieved great success on the podium, and is preparing to step down as music director of the Oregon Symphony after nearly a quarter century. Andante (AP) 07/14/02

Friday July 12

FINAL COPY: The head of Australia’s largest university has been forced to resign after multiple claims that he plagiarized. David Robinson, the embattled vice-chancellor of Monash University, quit after being summoned back from a trip to London. “He could see he was creating damage for the university. The only solution that he could see, and I could see, and we came to this together, was to leave.” The Age (Melbourne) 07/12/02

Thursday July 11

WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO BE A SPANNER TOO: C-Span founder and host Brian Lamb has a cult following among viewers known as “Spanners” for their devotion to the cable network. “Lamb is open to interpretations of himself – the solemn ones, mocking ones, camp ones. He’ll play along. He is resigned to his celebrity niche. He has been called the most boring and the most trusted man in America, both of which he would take as a source of pride, or, at least, humor.” Washington Post 07/12/02

JESSYE’S ROUGH NIGHT: Sopranos can rarely sing at a high level up to their 60th birthday. Jessye Norman is 56, and her first recital at Tanglewood in years was a disaster this week. Clearly not in good voice, she cut short her program, then “mouthed the words ‘I’m sorry’ as she swept from the stage after singing excerpts from Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’ete.” Boston Globe 07/11/02

Wednesday July 10

JACKO’S CRUSADE: Michael Jackson’s tirade against the recording industry for being unfair to artists, particularly black artists, seems a stretch, given the mega-bucks he’s made in his career. Last weekend he said that “the recording companies really, really do conspire against the artists. They steal, they cheat, they do everything they can, [especially] against the black artists.” But Jackson has been locked in a dispute with his recording label, and his career hasn’t been going well… Philadelphia Inquirer 07/10/02

STRIKE OUT: Outgoing Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa is a big baseball fan. So when the orchestra was planning his farewell, Ozawa suggested a final concert at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. Sure, said the orchestra, and quickly negotiated a date with the ballclub. But then the numbers came in – it would cost “at least $500,000 to build staging, a sound system, and other support for the show.” So the plans were abandoned. Boston Globe 07/10/02

Tuesday July 9

COMMITTED: Alberto Vilar is “believed to give more money to opera than any other donor in the world, and he is one of the top givers to the arts in general, as well. His gifts include a total of $33 million to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, $10 million to Los Angeles Opera, and $50 million to Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But since late last year – when Vilar was laid up with medical problems and his company was laid low by the downturn in the stock market – rumors and press reports that he is not honoring his pledges to the arts have surfaced in the United States and Europe.” Los Angeles Times 07/09/02

Monday July 8

STUDYING THE STUDIERS: Intellectual historians sometimes grumble that their peers don’t regard them as doing “real” history. After all, they study books and ideas, rather than digging around in archives to chart the course of wars and revolutions, or the almost-unreconstructible life of, say, an Aztec peasant. Tony Grafton works on old, dead classicists. How much less-sexy can you get? And yet his work is read not only by medievalists and Renaissance scholars, but by a general audience as well.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/08/02

MICHAEL JACKSON VS PRODUCERS: Michael Jackson has joined the list of pop artists charging that recording companies take advantage of musicians. But he adds a racial element to the complaints. “The record companies really do conspire against the artists. Especially the black artists.” Los Angeles Times 07/07/02

Sunday July 7

JOHN FRANKENHEIMER, 72: Hollywood director John Frankenheimer, famous for his tales of political intrigue and dark conspiracies, has died. His films included Seven Days In May and The Manchurian Candidate. The New York Times 07/07/02

Thursday July 4

HARVARD’S LOSS: James Cuno’s departure as director of the Harvard Museums to become director of the Courtauld Institute is “certainly not glad tidings for Harvard, with its famously ambivalent attitude toward art, especially of the contemporary sort that Cuno has championed. There is fear now that the progress Cuno has made will halt or even be reversed, that his agenda – including plans for a new Renzo Piano -designed museum on the banks of the Charles – will unravel.” Boston Globe 07/03/02

Wednesday July 3

RAY BROWN, 75: One of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century has died. Bassist Ray Brown revolutionized his instrument’s role in jazz, and was one of the creators of bebop. He played with nearly every legend of the genre and was a founding member of the Oscar Peterson Trio. He was still performing at the age of 75, and was finishing up a U.S. tour at the time of his death yesterday. Nando Times (AP) 07/03/02

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Katherine Dunham’s name has never been as immediately recognizable as Martha Graham’s, but the 93-year-old dancer/choreographer has contributed arguably as much as Graham to the world of dance. An innovative choreographer, a quietly political crusader, and a devoted student of African and Western dance traditions, Dunham is finally starting to gain the recognition many aficionados feel she has long been deserving of. Boston Globe 07/03/02

FALLEN FROM GRACE, AND BITTER AS HELL: Time was in Hollywood when you couldn’t make a move (or a movie) without Michael Ovitz’s say-so. But today, Ovitz is a bitter and broken man, a few years removed from his embarrassing ouster at Disney, and smarting from the collapse of his once-dominant talent agency. Ovitz is lashing out in a soon-to-be-published interview in Vanity Fair, claiming, among other things, that a Hollywood “gay mafia” is responsible for his downfall. The New York Times 07/03/02

Tuesday July 2

WINKING AT THE TAX MAN: Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski is being investigated for tax evasion on purchases of art he bought but for which he didn’t pay sales tax, claiming that the work was being shipped out of New York. What gave him away? “Investigators had obtained a fax which listed some of the paintings that were being shipped to New Hampshire with the words ‘wink wink’ in parentheses, indicating that the objects were not going to New Hampshire but were instead going to Mr Kozlowski’s New York address.” The Art Newspaper 06/30/02

Monday July 1

PICTURING BARYSHNIKOV: A new book tells dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov life in pictures. But first he talks about a long career. “In this country, there’s so much dance, so much talent, so much choice. American tradition of entertainment is very strong. We are entertainers, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” The Plain Dealer 07/01/02

Sunday June 30

ROSEMARY CLOONEY, 74: “Rosemary Clooney, whose warm, radiant voice placed her in the first rank of American popular singers for more than half a century, died last night at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 74. The cause was complications from lung cancer.” The New York Times 06/30/02

MORE CONTROVERSY FOR WEST: Cornel West has built a career out of being simultaneously brilliant and confrontational. He has cut a rap album, published a seminal work on race in America, and feuded publicly with the president of Harvard University. He is also one of America’s most respected acadmics. So when he was invited to participate in a conference on the philosopher Sidney Hook, it came as something of a surprise to organizers when a boycott of the conference was suddenly arranged by several conservative academics. The New York Times 06/29/02

NOBODY LIKES A KNOW-IT-ALL: The winner of this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs is the definition of an overachiever. He’s a professor at MIT, a yo-yo champ, the creator of the first digital library, and, according to a colleague, “the last person to know everything.” One of the Van Cliburn judges probably summed him up best: “People like that are so annoying.” Boston Globe 06/30/02

WHAT, NO MILITARY TRIBUNAL? British actor Steven Berkoff may not exactly be Ben Affleck on the International Fame chart, but he has several high-profile film roles to his credit, and is well regarded in the acting world. So imagine his surprise when, upon arriving in Michigan to speak at a festival, he was grilled by a low-level immigration official who promptly packed him back off to the UK. The reason: Berkoff overstayed his last US travel visa, in 1997, by one day. BBC 06/28/02

Wednesday June 26

WORST-KEPT SECRET: Less than two months after skipping out on his Metropolitan Opera finale, Luciano Pavarotti has announced his retirement from the stage. Speaking with CNN’s Connie Chung, Pavarotti struck back at critics who suggested that illness was not the reason for his Met cancellation, and set an end date, (his 70th birthday in 2005,) for his long career as the world’s most famous tenor. CNN 06/25/02

JAFFE’S LAST CURTAIN CALL: 40 may not be particularly old in most professions, but for a ballerina, it is a ripe old age, and one at which most dancers have already hung up their toe shoes. So it was for Susan Jaffe at the American Ballet Theater this week, as the company favorite took her final bows in a well-received performance at the Met. “The 25-minute ovation at the end left Ms. Jaffe, a heap of flowers at her feet, mouthing ‘I love you’ to the audience.” The New York Times 06/26/02

Tuesday June 25

THE PATH MOST LONELY: Chicago composer Ralph Shapey, who died last week at the age of 81, was a loner. “Someday when I’m dead and buried, some musicologist will start comparing my music with that of other composers of my generation. He will say, `Shapey was ahead of everybody – Carter, Babbitt, all the rest. They are nothing but imitations of what he did all along.’ I wish I could come back to hear that, I really do.” Chicago Tribune 06/25/02

Monday June 24

REMEMBERING J. CARTER BROWN: “Brown epitomised the American impresario art museum director. He was the first to hold a masters degree in business administration. His diplomatic skills pulled foreign loans to Washington by the planeload. Ever the pitch-man for his institution, he urged benefactors to donate art “for the nation.” The pitch worked, and paintings by Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso and Veronese flowed in.” The Art Newspaper 06/21/02

BACK IN PUBLIC: Playwright Tom Stoppard is back in public. He’s working at the National, and a rather thick new book about him has hit bookstores. “The fizzing cogency for which his plays are famed is hard won. He works long hours, shuns dinner parties because they conflict with his preferred working time, and has no concept of leisure, except that time devoted to his four sons (aged 27 to 36) and two grandchildren.” London Evening Standard 06/21/02

Friday June 21

MADONNA’S STAR DEMANDS: Reviews of Madonna’s acting performance in the West End were dismal. Still, the show has been selling out nightly, and the singer/actor has been demanding the full star treatment. “Among Madonna’s demands was that her dressing room be decorated in pale shades and fitted with a walk-in power shower. She also insisted that her bouncers remain each side of the stage when she is performing. She asked for the stage to be raised by several feet and decreed that large areas of the auditorium be closed to staff during performances.” So it’s no surprise that the theatre’s manager has just quit. London Evening Standard 06/21/02

Wednesday June 19

J. CARTER BROWN, 67: For 23 years Brown was director of the National Gallery in Washington DC, where he greatly expanded the museum’s collections and oversaw the IM Pei addition. He was founder of the Ovation TV arts channel, and director of the Atlanta Olympics arts festival, as well as chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. The New York Times 06/19/02

• THE POPULIST PATRICIAN: J. Carter Brown held one of the most powerful artistic posts in the nation, and yet his legacy is one of making art accessible to everyone. “Brown, an unashamed elitist, was also an inclusionist. He was a patrician multiculturist. To a museum that had only shown (and still only collects) objects from the West, he brought African art and Indian art, South Pacific carving, Noh robes from Japan, scimitars from Turkey, Costa Rican gold.” Washington Post 06/19/02

Tuesday June 18

RALPH SHAPEY, 81: Ralph Shapey, who died last weekend at the age of 81, was “perhaps America’s most relentlessly self-challenging composer, his catalogue having roughly 200 pieces for a huge range of ensembles. He also cared a great deal if people listened. In 1969, he went on strike as a composer, refusing to allow performances of his works until conditions for modern music improved. At one point, he even threatened to burn it all, which was possible since none of his music had been published and was all in manuscript.” The Guardian (UK) 06/17/02

Monday June 17

WHAT’S THE VISION? Rem Koolhaas “may be our greatest contemporary architect, but the nature and volume of his production indicate that he wants to be more than that. He plays the game of cultural critic and theorist, visionary, urbanist, and shaper of cities for the globalized, digitized, commercialized world of the twenty-first century. If we don’t begin thinking critically about what he’s doing, how our cities look and function might greatly reflect his influence – and what we get might not be what we want.” American Prospect 06/17/02

Wednesday June 12

DEALER SENTENCED FOR ART SALES: New York art dealer Frederick Schultz has been sentenced to 33 months in prison for trying to sell stolen Egyptian artifacts. “The stiff sentence, coming after Mr. Schultz’s conviction on Feb. 12, is seen as a sign of the federal government’s determination to crack down on the trade in ancient objects that have been illegally taken out of their countries of origin.” The New York Times 06/12/02

Tuesday June 11

HARVARD MUSEUM CHIEF TO COURTAULD: James Cuno, the director of the Harvard University Art Museums since 1991, has been named director of the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. The appointment is seen as a sideways move for the highly-regarded Cuno, who is also president of the Association of Art Museum Directors in the US. His departure from Harvard is “the latest in a number of high-profile departures from the university since the arrival last year of president Lawrence H. Summers.” Boston Globe 06/11/02

Monday June 10

PAUL GOTTLIEB, 67: “In his 20 years as publisher and editor in chief of the country’s most notable publisher of art books he exercised vast influence, not merely on how such books are published but also on how art is presented and promoted at museums around the world. Gottlieb knew just about everybody connected in one way or another to publishing and art.” Washington Post 06/10/02

Friday June 7

RATTLE IN CALIFORNIA: Star conductor Simon Rattle hasn’t performed in the Bay Area since 1988. But it turns out the new Berlin Philharmonic chief is a regular visitor – his kids live there. Tonight he performs as a pianist with his son. In a rare American interview he tells Joshua Kosman that he never really considered leading an American orchestra. “I know that with any American orchestra, I would’ve had to spend a lot of my time fighting for existence, reminding people why we had to be there and taking much more of an educational role than I wanted to take on at this time in my life.” San Francisco Chronicle 06/07/02

HOW LEW WASSERMAN RUINED THE MOVIES: He was mourned as a legend this week. But “missing from all the gushy epitaphs is an example of a single great picture that got made because of Wasserman’s vision. “If the only movies playing at your local cineplex are Spider-Man and the new Star Wars epic, Wasserman deserves much of the blame. Even during the drug-induced brilliance of 1970s Hollywood, Wasserman’s taste at Universal was always conservative, middle-aged, and middlebrow: no Coppolas, no Altmans, no Scorseses.” Slate 06/06/02

• OKAY, SO THE MOVIES WEREN’T ANY GOOD: “Wasserman, who died Monday from the effects of a stroke, was a major figure in the history of Los Angeles, a key figure in the history of American Jews, a critical figure in the history of American politics, even an important transitional figure in the history of capitalism itself. And, yeah – he changed movies too, not entirely for the better.” LAWeekly 06/06/02

Thursday June 6

NOT VERY COMMITTED: “Edo de Waart, the mercurial chief conductor and artistic director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, will not be returning to Sydney this year to fulfil his obligations with the orchestra, opting, instead, to stay at home in the Netherlands for the birth of his child.” de Waart has ditched other SSO concerts this year, and has complained about the hardship of commuting to Australia from Europe. He has 18 months left on his contract. Sydney Morning Herald 06/06/02

Tuesday June 4

STRITCH SOUNDS OFF: Producers of Sunday night’s Tony Awards were generally ruthless about pushing winners to keep their speeches short. Most wrapped up the talking as soon as they heard the music nudge them when their two minutes were up. One who didn’t, and was caught mid-sentence was Elaine Stritch. “The 76-year-old Broadway star was thanking her producers when the orchestra started playing over her speech…’Please, don’t do this to me’,” she pleaded as the telecast cut to commercial. “Backstage, Stritch, crying and shaking with anger, said, ‘I am very, very upset. I know CBS can’t let people do the Gettysburg Address at the Tonys, but they should have given me my time’.” New York Post 06/03/02

Sunday June 2

ALBEE LIVES: Edward Albee is riding a crest of popularity. His work is being widely produced, and he’s up for a Tony Award for Best Play. “Not bad for a species of writer thought not too long ago to be extinct.” It wasn’t always so. “Until Three Tall Women, he says, none of his plays ever received better than 50 percent good reviews, not even Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ‘ I’ve always been aware of the difference between critical evaluation and value. You learn this. But there are some writers who say, `Oh my God, unless I am loved, unless I am praised, I am nothing.’ That was never particularly of any importance to me’.” Hartford Courant 06/02/02

ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD: Forty years after his first professional gig, Frank Sinatra Jr. is still on the road singing. Singing in the shadow of his famous dad has certainly been an impediment to his career, but he’s still out there trying to keep the ‘era’s music alive. “We’re losing this music. We lost Miss Peggy Lee two months ago. Between Keely Smith, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett, that’s just about all that’s left. A whole era is passing.” Chicago Sun-Times 06/02/02

Friday May 31

FRAUGHT WITH FREUD: Lucien Freud is widely considered Britain’s best living painter. Next month he’ll get a major retrospective of his work in London. “As many of his sitters have found, having Lucian Freud recreate you in paint is not an unrelieved joy. Jerry Hall’s portrait turned her into an amorphous lump of pregnant fleshy blubber. The Queen’s portrait, unveiled last December, provoked a tirade of abuse for its unflattering delineation of a blue-chinned nightclub bouncer in a fright wig and a filthy temper.” The Independent (UK) 05/30/02

BROWN STEPS DOWN: J Carter Brown, former head of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, for 23 years, “a trustee at Brown University, chairman of the jury for the Pritzker Prize, the prestigious architecture award, and a member of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, among other positions,” has resigned from “the many arts, education and historic preservation boards on which he serves,” because of severe bad health. Washington Post 05/31/02

Wednesday May 29

“ROMANIAN CULTURE IS TWICE IN MOURNING”: A former principal dancer with the Romanian Opera House commited suicide after her partner died last weekend. “Irinel Liciu, 74, took an overdose of sleeping pills after the death of celebrated Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas, 80. They had been married for more than 42 years.” Nando Times (AP) 05/28/02

Tuesday May 28

PORTRAIT OF A PHILANTHROPIST: Jean-Marie Messier is the charismatic head of Vivendi Universal, the world’s second largest media company. In France he is a controversial figure, but in New York, where he moved eight months ago, he’s become immersed in the city’s cultural life, joining prestigious boards of major cultural institutions. “Mr. Messier’s smooth entree into New York is one of the clearest examples of how an outsider with financial resources, status and connections can penetrate the city’s inner circle of culture and philanthropy, even as his corporate leadership comes under severe attack.” The New York Times 05/28/02

Monday May 27

PLAYING SWEET: It wasn’t too many years ago that playwright Peter Gill was bitter and frustrated by British theatre. “Now 62, the Cardiff-born writer and director, who made his name at the Royal Court in the 1960s, is enjoying the kind of exposure that is generally accorded only to the very young or very dead.” The Guardian (UK) 05/27/02

Sunday May 26

SECOND ACTS: Itzhak Perlman is one of the great violinists of the past century. But since he turned 50 a few years ago, increasingly his interested have turned to teaching and conducting. “That means he’ll make a call to a student at intermission of one of his own concerts if he remembers something he forgot to say during a lesson.” As for conducting, “his stick technique is quirky, but the players can follow him; he communicates through a deep reservoir of animated expressions and gestures. He has large, strong hands, and all those years of walking on crutches have created tremendous torque in his upper body; his physical energy is commanding.” Detroit Free Press 05/26/02

CONDUCTOR MOVES ON: Eiji Oue is leaving his post as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. The orchestra has a long and storied history, but had fallen into a rut before Oue came. “His greatest and most indelible feat is intangible — coaxing this orchestra to perform from the heart rather than the mind. It also exposed what some see as his greatest failing. People inside and outside the orchestra see Oue as soft and underinvolved in the technical details required for flawless performance. Oue wanted his musicians to soar through a boundless skyline; with Oue, some musicians felt adrift in the wind.” St. Paul Pioneer Press 05/26/02

Friday May 24

ABRUPT EXIT: Giving only a week’s notice, Dallas Opera General Director Mark Whitworth-Jones quits the company after two years on the job. He “acknowledged frustration with the local fund raising situation during the economic downturn and in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He said subscription revenue was down 17 percent during the 2001-02 season. The company has also found its fund raising for annual operations competing with efforts to raise money for the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, as part of the proposed Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.” Dallas Morning News 05/23/02

FORMER EXEC SUES LA CHAMBER ORCHESTRA: The former executive director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has sued the orchestra, claiming that he was treated badly by the board and that after he left the orchestra “publicizing untruthful statements about his job performance.” Los Angeles Times 05/24/02

NORMAN MEETS THE QUEEN: Queen Elizabeth invites in Britain’s cultural elite for a meet and greet. “We were, someone said, the elite of the arts: the 600 makers and shakers of creative society. But the guest list for the party at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly was entertainingly eclectic. I met a man who runs a theatre in a North Yorkshire village of 200. Just beyond him was Sir Simon Rattle, music director of the world’s premier orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic.” London Evening Standard 05/23/02

Wednesday May 22

ELVIS LIVES (OLD NEWS): This year is the 25th anniversary of Elvis’ death. “But although Elvis might be dead – despite reports to the contrary from people who have seen him serving in chippies in Doncaster, square-dancing by himself at the Clinton County Fair in Oregon or, most recently, buying two chicken mega-buckets at KFC in Glasgow while cunningly disguised as a business development manager for an international finance company – his legacy is emphatically not. This anniversary year, in addition to all the existing commercial exploitation of his memory,” a flood of products eager to cash in on the King are planned. The Independent (UK) 05/18/02

SCORE ONE FOR THE IVORY TOWERS: A Massachusetts court has dismissed a case against Wellesley College brought by high-profile professor Adrian Piper. Wellesley hired Piper, a prominent artist and author, with great fanfare back in 1990, but the relationship quickly soured, with the college contending that Piper appeared not to be interested in fulfilling the obligations of an academic career, and Piper insisting that Wellesley was blocking her from pursuing her career. Boston Globe 05/22/02

Tuesday May 21

STEPHEN JAY GOULD, SCIENTIST, AUTHOR: “Stephen Jay Gould – who died of lung cancer yesterday at the age of 60 – was a prize example of a very rare breed. Gould was a professor at Harvard, a longtime columnist for Natural History magazine, the author of numerous bestsellers, and a dependably feisty public intellectual. He did not suffer fools gladly; he pummeled them in print.” Washington Post 05/21/02

MILLER FIRED FROM MET? Star director Jonathan Miller says he’s been fired by the Metropolitan Opera “following a dispute with the Italian diva Cecilia Bartoli. In a startlingly frank interview with a respected music writer, Miller is also scathing about the acting skills of the ‘Three Tenors’, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras, and savagely attacks opera audiences.” The Guardian (UK) 05/20/02

ADAMS TO CARNEGIE? Carnegie Hall is expected to announce that John Adams will be its next composer-in-residence, succeeding Pierre Boulez at the end of next season. NewMusicBox 05/19/02

Sunday May 19

AND HE SHOWS UP FOR PERFORMANCES, TOO: While the arts world trades gossip about the spectacular collapse of the most famous of the Three Tenors, one of the others has quietly gone about securing his place in operatic history. Placido Domingo, still a fine singer at the age of 61, has broadened his activities over the last decade to include conducting, directing, and the art of running a major opera company. In all these things, he has found success, to the surprise of many observers, and, in so doing, has crafted one of the most impressive operatic careers of the last century. Washington Post 05/22/02

ROBESON REDUX: “On May 18, 1952, Paul Robeson — who will be remembered as one of the greatest singers of the 1940s, the first black superstar in the United States, a civil-rights hero and a tragic figure destroyed by McCarthyism — stood on the back of a flat-bed truck parked at the edge of the Canadian border and sang songs of solidarity to a crowd of 40,000. Fifty years later, that legendary concert will be recreated at the very same park.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 05/18/02

DODGING BULLETS FOR A LIVING: Tessa Jowell may have the most thankless job in Tony Blair’s New Labour government in the U.K. As Culture Secretary, it is her job to deal with every arts controversy that could make the government look bad (no shortage of those,) and do it quickly and quietly. “Tessa Jowell is adept at having things more than one way at once, a crucial New Labour quality. So she emphasises her reputation for efficiency, but says more than once that she thinks the Government’s emphasis on targets is overdone and that her job is in large part about ‘investing in risk’.” The Observer (UK) 05/19/02

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS SELF-ABSORBED: Artist Tracy Emin’s career has always been more or less an exercise in voyeurism, with high-profile pieces ranging from an unmade bed (which was shortlisted for the Turner Prize,) to “a tent embroidered with the names of every man she ever slept with.” Emin is at Cannes this month, raising money for the ultimate peep show into her life – a feature film detailing her childhood in Margate, England. BBC 05/19/02

IT’S A DIRTY JOB, BUT… Okay, so it’s not exactly curator at the Guggenheim, but Mierle Ukeles likes her job just fine. She is the artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, and has been described by one critic as ‘the art world’s preeminent garbage girl.’ She creates art from trash, art celebrating trash (and the folks who get rid of it for us,) and would prefer to hang out at Staten Island’s famous Fresh Kills Landfill than at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But judging from the critical reaction to her work, the garbage theme is no gimmick. For Ukeles, it’s a passion. A darned weird passion, but a passion, nonetheless. New York Times 05/19/02

Thursday May 16

ARTS ADVOCATE: Karen Kain was Canada’s most famous dancer ever. Five years after she retired from the stage, she’s now one of the country’s savviest cultural promoters, transforming herself into “one of the most passionate, articulate and effective cultural advocates Canada has ever had.” Toronto Star 05/15/02

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: “The least-known great architect who ever worked in the [U.S.] capital — or, for that matter, in the nation — may be Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Representatives from nine preservation and cultural groups — including five from Washington — yesterday announced a five-year, $50 million attempt to make the name more famous… Latrobe was the architect of the most memorable rooms in the U.S. Capitol, including Statuary Hall and the old Senate and Supreme Court chambers. He designed both the north and south porticoes of the White House.” And that’s just the beginning… Washington Post 05/16/02

Sunday May 12

TOSCANINI’S LOVE LETTERS: He defined a generation of conductors with his rages and his passionate performances, but off the podium, Arturo Toscanini was a private man. Still, much has been written of his life, and many writers have spent many pages speculating on his motivations. A new collection of letters, many written to his several mistresses, sheds some fresh light on a legend which has threatened to grow stale in recent years. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 05/12/02

Friday May 10

CULTURE WARRIOR REMEMBERED: Livingston Biddle, who died this week at the age of 83, was one of the architects of the National Endowment for the Arts and a former NEA director. An ideological opponent remembers him fondly: “What was missing in newspaper accounts were the distinguishing humane qualities that Biddle possessed, especially the gentle mien and fundamental decency, in short supply amid public debate surrounding culture in America. He was a writer himself, married to an artist, and so understood what was at stake in debates over the future of arts raging during the 1990s.” The Idler 05/10/02

SUPER SLAVA: Is Mstislav Rostropovich one of the great cellists in history?  “The former music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., for 17 years has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees and more than 90 major awards in 25 different countries, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Kennedy Center Honors in the United States.” Christian Science Monitor 05/10/02

CRONENBERG’S CANNES: No one could ever accuse David Cronenberg of lacking Hollywood’s taste for excess. But aside from one or two brief flirtations, his career as a filmmaker has mostly taken place outside of Tinseltown, and his best films have achieved only “cult classic” status. His latest work is called Spider (no “man,” thank you,) and it is Canada’s only entry in the judging at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a fact of national pride which is not lost on Cronenberg. Toronto Star 05/10/02

Thursday May 9

PAVAROTTI BOWS OUT OF MET: So Pavarotti canceled another performance at the Met. Nothing much unusual about that (it was the flu this time). Except that it was his second-to-last scheduled performance there, and he’s not on the schedule next year or thereafter. Some feel he may never appear at the Met again. And expectations for this Saturday’s performance of Tosca are high. Philadelphia Inquirer 05/09/02

• GREAT EXPECTATIONS: “The Met is charging $75 to $1,875 instead of the usual $30 to $265 for Saturday night’s performance, followed by a formal dinner and dance, and is setting up a video screen on Lincoln Center plaza and distributing 3,000 free tickets for a simulcast.” New York Post (AP) 05/09/02

Wednesday May 8

MURRAY ADASKIN, 96: Murray Adaskin, one of Canada’s most prominent composers, has died in Victoria at the age of of 96. “Adaskin, born in Toronto to a musical family on March 26, 1906, had a distinguished and varied career that spanned most of the 20th century. One constant was a passion for Canadian culture.” The Times-Colonist (Victoria) 05/08/02

• FOR THE JOY OF MUSIC: “Adaskin was a complete musician. He worked as a violinist, composer, teacher and mentor, and served as an unfailingly good comrade to five generations of colleagues.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/08/02

DIVA DREAMS: Soprano Joan Sutherland is 75. “It’s nice to be remembered. But the whole opera thing has changed from top to bottom. It has all changed. Even the way that the productions are geared. I’m glad I finished when I did. I might have done a few walkouts.” Did she ever think about singing again? “Only once since 1990 has Sutherland thought to let it rip one last time. A year or two after her retirement, her husband was flying home from Canada and ‘I decided to surprise him’. But after a day’s strenuous vocal exercises she found herself coughing and choking. ‘So then I really did give up’.” The Guardian (UK) 05/08/02

Tuesday May 7

EXIT INTERVIEW: Departing Lincoln Center chairman Beverly Sills says ”When I came here as chairman eight years ago I was promised that it would be a three-day week with five-hour days. It was never that, not from the first week. It was five-day, sometimes seven-day weeks, and the days sometimes went from 7:30 in the morning to 11:30 at night.” But the worst time was probably the most recent. “In the past 18 months, Lincoln Center has seen the resignations of three successive presidents and its real estate chairman. City Opera is threatening to leave the Center altogether. Media reports have been rife with tales of tense, even screaming, board meetings (which Sills and others insist are exaggerated or false).” Boston Globe 05/06/02

FIRST COUPLE: Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu are opera’s star couple. Married in real life, they also collaborate onstage. But the nicknames of “the world’s greatest French tenor and the most celebrated of its young sopranos are not affectionate. They include ‘the Ceausescus’, while director Jonathan Miller famously nicknamed them ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ after Alagna failed to turn up for some rehearsals of his production of La Boheme at the Bastille opera in Paris. The Bastille also dubbed the Romanian-born Gheorghiu ‘La Draculette’.” The Telegraph (UK) 05/07/02

Monday May 6

LIVINGSTON BIDDLE, JR, 83: Livingston Biddle Jr. helped draft legislation to create the National Endowment for the Arts and was its chairman from 1971-81. “As endowment chairman, he ran interference with Congress and the public over complaints about funding of controversial subjects and combined his experience and savvy in government and the arts to increase the base of support for the arts. He helped work out relationships between federal and state art efforts, worked to keep politics out of the endowment and fought for support for minorities in the arts and for bringing arts to the handicapped.” Washington Post 05/05/02

DRABINSKY RETURNS? Canadian theatre impressario Garth Drabinsky is accused of perpetrating a fraud of $100 million before his company Livent collapsed a few years ago. But that isn’t stopping the dsigraced showman (who can’t set foot in the US because he’d be arrested) from plotting a Broadway comeback. He plans to bring The Dresser back to New York. The New York Times 05/06/02

SUMMING UP MASUR: Kurt Masur is finishing up his last few weeks as music director of the New York Philharmonic. “The Masur decade sometimes seems like a barrier island, a sandy, pleasant enough strip of beach between relief and anticipation. All this is very unfair. Masur’s tenure was not only full of musical accomplishments, it produced some genuine New York City rowdiness of its own. If Masur did his part in raising the orchestra’s sense of dignity and common purpose, he did so by an odd mix of old-school tyranny and democratic participation.” Newsday 05/05/02

• BUILDING A LEGACY: Christoph von Dohnanyi is in his final month as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. He’s “had the artistic time of his life in Cleveland, where he achieved remarkable things: uncommon ensemble finesse, arresting performances, adventurous programs, distinguished recordings, a gleaming Severance Hall renovation. Along the way, the Berlin-born conductor experienced a few scuffles with management over artistic control, and he saw his ambitious project to record and to perform Wagner’s four-work Ring cycle aborted after the first two operas because of the collapse of the classical recording industry.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 05/05/02

SVETLANOV, DEAD AT 73: Yevgeny Svetlanov, one of Soviet Russia’s most-enduring conductors, has died at the age of 73. Russian president Vladimir Putin “wrote in a message to Svetlanov’s wife, Nina, that the musician’s death was an ‘irreplacable loss for all of our culture’.” Two years ago Svetlanov was “dismissed from his post conducting the State Symphony Orchestra after Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi said he was spending too much time conducting overseas.” Yahoo News (AP) 05/05/02

WAS SHAKESPEARE GAY? A portrait of one of Shakespeare’s patrons has renewed speculation about his sexuality. “The debate over Shakespeare’s sexuality is 150 years old and will hardly be resolved by this girlish-looking portrait of Southampton. But the identification of the subject of this painting, described by some British newspapers as ‘Southampton in drag,’ has reawakened speculation over the possible bisexuality of Shakespeare, who left his wife, Anne Hathaway, in Stratford-Upon-Avon when he moved to London.” The New York Times 05/06/02

Sunday May 5

JARVI QUITS DETROIT: Neeme Jarvi, 64, has decided to step down as music director of the Detroit Symphony at the close of the 2004-05 season, leaving a 15-year legacy that will be remembered as one of the orchestra’s most important eras. Jarvi – who says he has fully recovered from the ruptured blood vessel he suffered at the base of his brain last July – announced his plans to the orchestra at Thursday’s rehearsal at Orchestra Hall.” Detroit Free Press 05/03/02

Friday  May 3

HEPPNER RE-EMERGES: Tenor Ben Heppner has been a major star in the past decade. But when he walked out of a recital in Toronto a few months ago, then canceled the rest of his North American tour, he left critics whispering that he was having some major problems with his voice. Perhaps the kind of problems that could end a career. His concert in Seattle this week leaves some of those questions unanswered. “His formal program was only about an hour. He sang few fortissimos and a handful of fortes. High notes were at a strict minimum, and there were few technical challenges. The musical ones were substantial. Good sense dictated those terms. And even at that, there were some tiny, tiny breaks in the voice, an indication he is still not wholly recovered.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 05/02/02

PIPER’S LAMENT: “Adrian Piper arrived at Wellesley College in 1990 with the buzz of a Hollywood It Girl. The New York Times called her ”the artist of the fall season in New York” for her conceptual art on racism. Her work in Kantian ethics had inspired Wellesley to make her the first African-American woman to become a tenured full professor of philosophy in the United States… But somehow, soon after arriving on campus, the It Girl of academe lost her way.” Boston Globe 05/02/02

Wednesday May 1

HIS FRIENDS JUST CALLED HIM ‘DOUBLE H’: “Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who died Saturday at age 81 at his home on the northern Mediterranean coast of Spain, was the greatest art collector of the second half of the 20th century.” His massive collection of European and American art has been given a permanent home in Madrid. Los Angeles Times 05/01/02

HOW TO ACT LIKE A ROCK STAR ON YOUR BOOK TOUR: His name is Neil Pollack, and he may or may not be fictional. He may or may not be Dave Eggers. (His mother swears he’s not.) He may or may not be the most exciting thing to happen to Canadian literature since Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. And he most definitely does not care what you or Margaret Atwood or the stuffy old publishing industry thinks about any of it. National Post (Canada) 05/01/02

Tuesday April 30

ANOTHER SOTHEBY’S SENTENCE: A week after ex-Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman was sentenced to jail and a $7 million fine, Diana Brooks, the auction house’s ex-CEO was sentenced to “three years probation for her role in conducting a price-fixing scheme with the rival auction house Christie’s. Mrs. Brooks, 51, was also ordered to serve six months of home detention, perform 1,000 hours of community service and pay a fine of $350,000.” The New York Times 04/30/02

HEY JUDE – NO SALE: Paul McCartney won a court injunction to stop the auction of the original manuscript of Hey Jude. The current owner bought it in a London street market in the early 70s, but McCartney says the paper was taken from his house. New York Post (Reuters) 04/30/02

Monday April 29

GRAMMY PRESIDENT FORCED TO QUIT: Micahel Greene, who, as president of the Grammys for 14 years, became one of the “most powerful and controversial figures in the music industry” has been forced out of the job. “Greene’s resignation as president took place during an emergency board meeting at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to discuss a sexual harassment probe commissioned by the Grammy organization, the sources said.” Los Angeles Times 04/28/02

• CLEARED OF CHARGES: The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences release a statement saying Greene was cleared of sexual misconduct, but does not say why Greene is leaving. “A full and fair investigation of alleged misconduct by Mike was completed and it revealed no sexual harassment, no sex discrimination and no hostile work environment at the recording academy.” Nando Times (AP) 04/28/02
• DIFFICULT PERSONALITY: “He was praised by some in the industry as an ambitious executive who played a large part in elevating the Grammys’ glamour, prestige and high profile, while expanding the academy’s membership, outreach, philanthropy and community involvement. But others within and outside the organization found fault with his sometimes abrasive personal style, which had a negative impact on the academy, as Mr. Greene himself has admitted.” The New York Times 04/29/02

DEATH OF A GREAT COLLECTOR: Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, one of the world’s great art collectors, has died in Spain. He “ruled uncontested among the art collectors of the past century. A Swiss national of German-Hungarian descent, he resisted the pull of Modernism and recreated the whole universe of Western art in a collection that embraced everything from the Italians of the trecento. Yet people tended to look down on Thyssen as nothing more than a rich hedonist, a lady’s man and a dandy. In the world of art, however, this head of a huge international conglomerate was a great pioneer.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04/28/02

Thursday April 25

ARREST WARRANT FOR HUGHES: An arrest warrant has been issued in Australia for art critic Robert Hughes after he missed a court date to face charges of dangerous driving. “The charges stem from a crash in which Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, was almost killed in May 1999 while in Australia filming a documentary for the BBC.” BBC 04/24/02

NOBLE’S LEAVING, BUT WHY? Some are suggesting that Adrian Noble is leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company because he is having success with a new musical in London’s West End. Noble says that’s not true. Others are betting that he simply got sick of all the criticism that comes with the RSC’s top job. Noble says that’s not it either. So why did he resign? Noble’s not saying, apparently. BBC 04/25/02

WONG DEFENDS HIS RECORD: Samuel Wong has been embroiled in controversy ever since taking the reins at the Hong Kong Philharmonic, with musicians and reporters alternately claiming that he’s a dictator and that he has no control. But Wong refuses to be a pessimist, and says he still enjoys the orchestra: “Hong Kong is a model for symphony orchestras around the world. We have a recording contract, we tour, we have regular TV and radio broadcasts, the government gives us US$9 million a year, we do adventuresome programming, we do children’s concerts, outreach, we play at a high standard. So if there is noise and friction, let there be. I don’t welcome it, but if that’s the cost, I’ll accept it.” Andante 04/25/02

Wednesday April 24

MARK ERMLER’S LEGACY: Conductor Mark Ermler died last week at age 69 after collapsing on the podium in front of the Seoul Philharmonic. “He will be remembered in Russia chiefly for a host of distinguished opera and ballet performances at the Bolshoi – with a prolific discography to match – and, in Britain, for returning the music of the Tchaikovsky ballets to centre-stage at Covent Garden.” The Guardian (UK) 04/23/02

OUE TO OSAKA: Minnesota Orchestra music director Eiji Oue, who will leave Minneapolis at the end of this season, has accepted the music director position at the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra in his native Japan. Oue is fully fifty years younger than the legendary conductor he replaces, Takashi Asahina, who passed away at age 93 last winter. Minneapolis Star Tribune 04/24/02

Tuesday April 23

SINGULAR SENSATION: Suzan-Lori Parks has had a big month, winning a Pulitzer and having her play open on Broadway. But it wasn’t overnight success. “At 38, Ms. Parks has been at the drama thing for a long time, ever since, as a Mount Holyoke student, her creative-writing teacher encouraged her to write plays. She wanted to write novels. Still, when your teacher is James Baldwin and he tells you you should be writing plays, well, you find yourself writing plays.” Dallas Morning News 04/23/02

Monday April 22

VONNEGUT RETIRING FROM PUBLIC? Writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 79, told a college crowd in Michigan this weekend that they had probably witnessed his last public appearance. “He did not offer an explanation, though he did ask that his evening speech be videotaped so he ‘could see how he looks’.” Nando Times (AP) 04/22/02

Sunday April 21

A LEGACY OF HIT-AND-MISS? Norman Foster is to Britain what Frank Lloyd Wright was to the U.S. – a beloved creator of buildings, an icon of architectural prowess. But time opens as many wounds as it heals, and success attracts critics like death attracts flies, the upshot being that as Foster approaches the last years of his career, his legacy is far from assured. The Guardian (UK) 04/20/02

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE: Many would argue that it doesn’t matter, and they may be right, but new evidence suggesting William Shakespeare may have been gay has been turned up in the form of a portrait of the third Earl of Southampton, “Shakespeare’s patron, the ‘fair youth’ addressed in his sonnets,” and very likely his lover. The discovery is unlikely to sit well with vehement defenders of Shakespeare’s legacy. The Observer (UK) 04/21/02

MAKING OPERA FUN, OR RUINING IT? “There is nothing anodyne about Richard Jones. His work, indeed his very personality, is unflinching, intense and often deeply witty. Over a 20-year career directing opera and theatre, he has been responsible for some of the stage’s most talked-about images: latex-clad Rhinemaidens inflated to the proportions of Michelin men at the Royal Opera House; a tyrannosaurus rex towering over Ann Murray’s Julius Caesar at the Staatsoper, Munich; a Ballo In Maschera in Bregenz in which a reclining skeleton, 32 metres high, clutched a vast open book that formed a stage floating on a lake.” The Guardian (UK) 04/20/02

STRAYHORN GETS HIS DUE: “Until recently, the great jazz composer Billy Strayhorn, who died in 1967, endured a strange kind of obscurity. Many knew that he joined Duke Ellington in 1939, that he was partly responsible for the explosion of first-class music to come from the band in the early 1940’s and that he collaborated with Ellington on some of his suites in the 1960’s. Strayhorn was not invisible, but the quality of his contribution was largely misunderstood.” The New York Times 04/21/02

STEALING THE ASSETS: “To many, Ron Protas is the most hated man in dance: a controlling and abusive manipulator intent on destroying the legendary Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance… Protas was dumped as the center’s artistic director in May 2000 after years of losing money and butting heads with its members, including one incident in which he allegedly tied up a dancer ‘to teach her fear.’ But he’s now attempting to wrestle away the one Graham asset he doesn’t have in his possession: the dances themselves.” New York Post 04/21/02

Thursday April 19

TAUBMAN MIGHT GET AWAY WITH IT? Former Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman could face a “maximum three-year term and a fine of at least $1.6 million to $8 million for leading a six-year antitrust conspiracy with Sotheby’s rival, Christie’s” that cost sellers as much as $43 million in overcharges. But the US Probation has recommended Taubman serve no prison time. The New York Times 04/19/02

KNIGHT PLAYWRIGHT: Alan Ayckbourn is one of England’s most popular playwrights. He’s “an odd mix. He plays the relaxed, easy-going egalitarian but, at the same time, he is clearly keen on his K (Though people singularly fail to cope with it. The milkman said: ‘Congratulations on your knighthood, Mr Ayckbourn’) and I reckon his six honorary degrees and two honorary fellowships are important to his sense of self-esteem.” The Telegraph (UK) 04/18/02

TRAILBLAZER: Marin Alsop has probably accomplished more than any other female conductor. “How big a role I’ve played in [blazing a trail for other women] I’m not certain,” Alsop says. “But I’m always very happy when young women [today] who are interested in the field think [being a woman is] a nonissue.” Christian Science Monitor 04/19/02

Tuesday April 16

MASUR ATTACKS HIS NY CRITICS: Outgoing New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur unloads on his New York critics in an interview in Le Monde. “He said that he had been unfairly called ‘a Communist, an anti-Semite, a dictator’.” Andante (Le Monde) 04/15/02

A STAR IS BORN: “Brad Oscar, who spent a year filling in for Nathan Lane in the Broadway musical The Producers, was abruptly handed the starring role of Max Bialystock Sunday night. The powers behind the show had concluded that Lane’s replacement, British actor Henry Goodman, wasn’t working out and dismissed him only four weeks into his contract. Oscar will appear opposite Steven Weber, who took over for Matthew Broderick.” Washington Post 04/16/02

Sunday April 14

SEIJI’S LEGACY: As Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra prepare to part ways after more than a quarter-century, the critics weigh in on his impact. Certainly, he is a legitimate star in the orchestral world, but it doesn’t take much prodding to get musicians around the world to complain about his imprecise baton or his questionable grasp of the core repertoire. “Paradoxically, now that Ozawa is 66 and beginning to be acclaimed in Vienna and elsewhere as an Old Master himself, he is far more radical, eclectic, and exploratory than he was as a young man. He is still eager to ‘taste’ all that music, particularly opera, that he hasn’t had the opportunity to conduct before, still adding nearly as much to his repertory as he repeats.” Boston Globe 04/14/02

• THE ROAD TO THE TOP: Like so many of the music world’s top performers, Seji Ozawa’s rise to prominence was part talent, part hard work, and part luck. He won his first conducting competition as a lark while tooling around Europe on a scooter, and almost immdiately caught the attention of legends like Charles Munch and Leonard Bernstein. His ascent to the top ranks was meteoric, and few conductors have ever put such a distinctive stamp on an orchestra as has Ozawa with the BSO. Boston Herald 04/14/02
• SEIJI SPEAKS: Through his years in Boston, Ozawa has rarely responded verbally to his critics, preferring to keep his dealings with the BSO in-house. In an extended interview with the city’s leading music critic, the maestro explains what it was he tried to create in Boston, and why controversy was inevitable: “‘When I came in, the orchestra played with a wonderful finesse of color that was the creation of Charles Munch and that was still there 10 years after he had left. I wanted a bigger and darker sound from the strings and the brass, and when I asked for it, some difficult situations arose.'” Boston Globe 04/14/02

CONDUCTOR COLLAPSES, DIES ON THE JOB: “Leading Russian conductor Mark Ermler, 69, died in Seoul on Sunday after collapsing during a rehearsal for a concert by the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, officials said. Ermler was associated with the Bolshoi Theatre and Opera throughout his career and was its musical director until 2000. He became chief conductor of the Seoul Philarmonic in May 2000.” Andante (Agence France-Presse) 04/14/02

A BEER AND A BUMP AND SOME BACH: There was a time when classical music was not the stuffy, formal, tuxedo-clad beast that it has become. Back in the day (the 18th century, actually,) classical music was, y’know, popular. A 31-year-old Israeli cellist is taking a stab at duplicating the effect, playing Bach in bars, clubs, and all sorts of other places you’d never think of. Baltimore Sun 04/13/02

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: “Montreal-born composer Henry Brant has some advice for young artists of all sorts. ‘Take care of yourself until you’re old enough to do your best work. That’s when everything becomes clearer what’s important and what’s less important, and how to proceed.’ Nobody could accuse him of failing to heed his own advice: At the age of 88 he’s in good health and has just won a Pulitzer Prize for composition.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/13/02

Friday April 12

SEIJI’S LAST SEASON: Seiji Ozawa is leaving the Boston Symphony after this season. But first there’s a round of parties, farewell concerts and interviews… Boston Herald 04/12/02

Thursday April 11

ATTACKING RALPH: Ralph Richardson’s archive of personal letters includes evidence of a nasty fight with novelist Graham Greene. “The row was over Richardson’s performance as a sculptor during rehearsals of Greene’s 1964 play Carving a Statue. The play flopped, ending the novelist’s 10 year run of successes in the West End. Even in rehearsals, the archive discloses, Greene blamed Richardson for not speaking the lines properly or understanding the part.” The Guardian (UK) 04/09/02 

Wednesday April 10

THE ACCIDENTAL CRITIC: Newsday’s Justin Davidson hasn’t been music critic for long – since 1995 – and fell into the business accidentally. But this week he won the Pulitzer for criticism. “The judges praised ‘his crisp coverage of classical music that captures its essence.’ Among the body of work receiving recognition were opera reviews and a series of long feature stories on recent developments in new music.” Newsday 04/09/02

Tuesday April 9

ELVIS SPEAKS OUT: Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky has been called the “Elvis of opera” by one magazine. And he’s got the credentials of a big time star. Yet he left his recording label contract after they tried to push him into some “tacky” crossover albums. He admires the Three Tenors, but he’s “distressed that the most famous opera singer in America is Andrea Bocelli. ‘That’s like saying the best cuisine in the world is chewing gum’.” The Telegraph (UK) 04/09/02

Monday April 8

SAINTED BUILDER? Architect Antonio Gaudí is on the fast track for sainthood by the Vatican. He’s “an architect for people who don’t really like architecture. Gaudí too had a very long career – he was still working when in 1926 he was hit by a tram and died – and began with brilliantly inventive projects, but in later life his work became ever more grandiose as the original delicacy ripened and then finally curdled. But the truth is that the architect has been turned into a sacred monster, casting a darkening and ever kitscher shadow over the city he did so much to shape.” The Observer (UK) 04/07/02

Sunday April 7

EXPLOITING BERNSTEIN: Is there another modern-era composer who’s been more marketed and promoted than Leonard Bernstein? His legacy has been relentlessly hawked since his death in 1990. But evidently, the Bernstein estate wants more. Gap ads. CD holders. “We’d like it exploited a little bit more. I think when people think of great music, a lot of people think of Bernstein. But he was much more. He was the American superstar of classical music, and not just classical, but Broadway and all the other things he did.” Philadelphia Inquirer 04/07/02

Thursday April 4

OCTOGENARIAN ROCK CRITIC RETIRES: Jane Scott may well be the most unlikely rock ‘n roll writer in the history of the genre. For the last 50 years, Scott has written, and written intelligently, about every corner of the rock world for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. Even at the beginning, she was older than most rock fans, and this week, the week she retires from her post, she turns 83. But Scott’s musings on the music that changed America have stood as some of the finest music writing any newspaper has produced, and her analysis of the good, the bad, and the ugly were read as gospel not only by fans, but by many of her colleagues. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 04/04/02

Wednesday April 3

JUILLIARD LOSES A LEGEND: “Benjamin Harkarvy, director of the dance division of the Juilliard School since 1992 and an internationally respected ballet teacher, director and choreographer, died on Saturday at St. Luke’s Hospital. He was 71… Before arriving at Juilliard, Mr. Harkarvy had been artistic director of important companies like the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Netherlands Dance Theater, the Dutch National Ballet, the Harkness Ballet and the Pennsylvania Ballet. A methodical and articulate teacher, he was constantly in demand by ballet schools around the world.” The New York Times 04/03/02

THE BAMBINO’S PIANO: As sports fans go, it doesn’t get much more obsessive than the folks who root for the Boston Red Sox. They can quote you Ted Williams’s stats from 1950, they can tell you what they had on their hot dogs the night Carlton Fisk waved it fair, and they would give one of their own limbs if it would somehow lift the “Curse of the Bambino,” the mythical glass ceiling that has kept the Sox from winning the World Series since 1918. Now, one man in Massachusetts thinks he has the answer: the Sox will win once he locates, rescues, and restores the piano that Babe Ruth supposedly hurled into a Boston-area pond. (Yeah, we know, but these are desperate people. Let them try.) Boston Globe 04/03/02

Tuesday April 2

SILLS TO LEAVE LINCOLN CENTER: After a rocky year, Beverly Sills says she will step down as chairwoman of Lincoln Center. “Her scheduled departure comes as Lincoln Center’s 11 participating arts groups are struggling to advance a $1.2 billion redevelopment project that has hit some roadblocks but that Ms. Sills insisted was still well on track.” The New York Times 04/02/02

Thursday March 28

UNCLE MILTIE PASSES ON: “Milton Berle, the brash comedian who emerged from vaudeville, nightclubs, radio and films to become the first star of television, igniting a national craze for the new medium in the late 1940’s, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.” The New York Times 03/28/02

LATIN LEGACY: It is one of the great literary paradoxes of the last century that the nations of Latin America could have been plagued by so many vicious dictators and repressive regimes, and yet still produced so many successful and widely-read novelists. Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most prolific and well-known, and, like so many of his contemporaries, he has spent his career treading the line between writing and politics. (Llosa even ran for president in his native Peru.) But to him, the spirit of Latin American writing is a special quality that has never been duplicated. The New York Times 03/28/02

Wednesday March 27

DOROTHY DELAY, 84: Behind every great musician, there is at least one great teacher, and Dorothy DeLay was that teacher to an astonishing number of the world’s top violinists for the past several decades. From Itzhak Perlman to Gil Shaham to Nigel Kennedy, DeLay was a legend among her students, and she became the closest thing the music world has to a matriarch, overseeing the progress of a studio of young musicians which can only be described as the finest in the world. Dorothy DeLay died this week, after a battle with cancer. The New York Times 03/27/02

Tuesday March 26

EVERYBODY HATES ME: Author Salman Rushdie said in a German interview that he thinks the British press is out to discredit him. “These ambush writers are probably angry that I wasn’t killed. They are holding a grudge against me for surviving the fatwa and that I’m now leading a better life.” BBC 03/26/02

DOROTHY DELAY, 84: Dorothy Delay was the world’s foremost violin teacher. A list of her students reads like a Who’s Who of the modern violin world. “DeLay began her teaching career at Juilliard in 1948, earning a reputation as the world’s foremost violin teacher — and a woman with the clout to boost young careers by picking up the phone and dialing an international network of managers and influential musicians.” Andante (AP) 03/25/02

Sunday March 24

AN UNUSUALLY DOWN-TO-EARTH DIVA: “Eileen Farrell, who excelled as both an opera and pop soprano in a string of successful recordings and performances including five seasons at the Met, died Saturday. She was 82… Although her career at opera’s top level was relatively brief, she was considered one of the leading dramatic sopranos of her time.” Andante (AP) 03/24/02

COURTING CONTROVERSY: Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a play about a meeting between two nuclear scientists, one Danish, one German, in 1941, has been under fire by numerous critics since its debut. Some say that the play doesn’t condemn Nazi policy strongly enough, others claim historical innacuracy. Frayn himself is circumspect: “With hindsight I think I accept some of these criticisms. [But] I’m not so sure about a greater stress on the evil of the Nazi regime. I thought that this was too well understood to need pointing out. It is, after all, the given of the play.” The Guardian (UK) 03/23/02

BOOING FROM THE WINGS: Valery Gergiev is one of those omnipresent conductors who seems always to be in demand and on top of the charts. But the usual backstage grumblings that plague many conductors have hit a fever pitch with Gergiev. Musicians hate him for his indecisive baton, critics complain that he knows too small a slice of the repertory, and administrators despise his chronic lateness and frequent cancellations. So why is he still so famous? The truth may be that competence often has little to do with conducting success, but it is equally true that musical insiders are often disdainful of artists who are popular with the public. The New York Times 03/24/02

SLAVA’S WORLD: Few musicians are as universally beloved as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and for good reason. The Russian emigré who has crafted one of the last century’s greatest performing and conducting careers is a bridge between the musical stars of yesterday and today. He has the profound presence of Pablo Casals, but the easy humor and approachability of Yo-Yo Ma, and th combination makes him a favorite with musicians and audiences alike. The New York Times 03/23/02

THE CRIME OF ACCESSIBILITY: “Philip Glass, who in his hungry years drove a cab in New York, likes to tell the story of the elderly passenger who looked at his taxi licence and informed him that he had the same name as a famous opera composer. That would never happen to Carlisle Floyd, a retired music professor who has had many more performances of his operas than Glass, without a 10th of the renown… Floyd’s cardinal sin, in some eyes, is to write music that pleases many and challenges no one. His realistic operas are full of hummable tunes, many of them fashioned after the folk songs he heard while following his father, a Methodist preacher, through the U.S. South during the thirties.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 03/23/02

Thursday March 21

BARENBOIM’S PEACE CALL: Conductor Daniel Barenboim, who last month wanted to perform a peace concert in a Palestinian town, and last year surprised his audience in Israel by performing Wagner, has published a call for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resign. “Sharon promised his voters peace and security, but delivered the opposite, and Arafat must go, he said, because many Palestinians were upset about a lack of democracy and widespread corruption in their own leadership ranks.”  Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/21/02

Wednesday March 20

POSTHUMOUS HONOR FOR DUMAS: “The ashes of the author behind The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, are to be transferred to the Pantheon in Paris. Dumas’ remains are currently in his home village of Villers-Cotterets but are to be moved to France’s most famous mausoleum… Those interred within are some of the country’s top luminaries including Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie and Emile Zola.” BBC 03/20/02

Tuesday March 19

OUT OF THE FAMILY: Laughlin Phillips has stepped down as chairman of Washington DC’s Phillips Collection. He’s held the position since 1972, and is the last of the Phillips family to have direct control over the museum. “Phillips made sweeping changes to the institution. Like many similar art museums across the country, the Phillips went from being the expression of a founder’s vision to being a major public amenity with a broader, if less personal, mandate and character.” Washington Post 03/19/02

TIMID AIRLINE BANS RUSHDIE: Air Canada has banned author Salman Rushdie from its planes because of the extra security he travels with. “The company said in an internal e-mail the checks would cause too much disruption and inconvenience to other passengers and Mr Rushdie should not be allowed to book flights with the airline.” BBC 03/19/02

Monday March 18

WRITER OF SLIGHT: Thomas Kinkade sells schlocky landscape paintings, “sold in thousands of mall-based franchise galleries nationwide,” and earning “$130 million in sales last year.” “According to Media Arts Group, the publicly traded company that sells Kinkade reproductions and other manifestations of ‘the Thomas Kinkade lifestyle brand,’ including furniture and other examples of what the company’s chairman memorably called ‘art-based products,’ his work hangs in one out of every 20 American homes.” Now Kinkade’s “written” a novel, a “shamelessly money-grubbing little bait-and-switch” aesthetically in line with the rest of the Kinkade empire. Salon 03/17/02

• PAINTER OF LIFESTYLE: Kinkade has his name on a housing development north of San Francisco that promises the idyllic kind of life depicted in his paintings.  “What is surprising, though, is just how far short of the mark it falls. I arrived at Kinkade’s Village expecting to be appalled by a horror show of treacly Cotswold kitsch; I was even more horrified by its absence.” Salon 03/17/02 

MAN OF THE THEATRE: Actor-director-writer Carmelo Bene has died at the age of 64. He was “the enfant terrible of Italian stage and screen” and “shared the distinction with Dario Fo of being a theatrical artist who also became a literary phenomenon. Afflicted with almost every illness in the medical books, and obliged to have four by-pass operations in the late 1980s (repeated in 2000), he reappeared in public in 1994 as the sole guest of Italian commercial TV’s most popular late-night talk show. He held his own for two hours against the onslaught of a sceptical but bemused audience. ” The Guardian (UK) 03/18/02

Sunday March 17

A LAVISH CAREER: At 79, director Franco Zeffirelli “is the same age as Verdi at the premiere of Falstaff, his comic farewell to the stage. The two have been in touch a great deal of late.” For decades, Zeffirelli’s lavish productions have been a Metropolitan Opera staple. Usually a hit with audiences, the productions haven’t been kindly treated by critics for some time. A revival of Zeffirelli’s Falstaff, which was his Met debut in 1964, is an opportunity to reflect on what initially attracted the opera world to him. The New York Times 03/17/02

Friday March 15

108 YEARS OF MUSIC (OR WAS IT 109?): Leo Ornstein was one of the most innovative American composers of the 1920s – if you’d asked most music critics of the time, they probably would have pegged him as America’s brightest music prospect. But by the 1930s he had disappeared from the music scene. Doesn’t mean he died though. In fact, he didn’t die until a few weeks ago, at the age of 108 or 109 (the year is in dispute). The Economist) 03/14/02

IN LETTERS: Dr. Edoardo Crisafulli, cultural attaché of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs writes to deplore an Observer article about a campaign by a group of British arts luminaries to lobby Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi to keep Mario Fortunato, the Italian cultural envoy to London: “There is no such thing as a witch-hunt against left-wing intellectuals at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as the general tenor of Ms Bedell’s [Observer] article seems to suggest – Mr Silvio Berlusconi is a democratically elected head of government, not a dictator. It is simply false to claim that Mr Mario Fortunato will not be reconfirmed because of his sexual orientation or political ideas.” ArtsJournal.com 03/15/02

• THE STORY: BUT HE THROWS A GOOD PARTY… London “arts celebrities” have mounted a campaign to pressure Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi not to remove Mario Fortunato, the Italian cultural envoy to London. “A letter to Mr Berlusconi, published last week in Italian and British newspapers, praised Dr Fortunato’s tenure as a roaring commercial and artistic success which turned the Belgravia institute into one of London’s hippest cultural spots.” The Guardian (UK) 02/25/02

Thursday March 14

RIOPELLE DIES: “Jean-Paul Riopelle, a great but impulsive artist who even when famous would burn his paintings to heat his apartment, died on Wednesday at his home on the Ile-aux-Grues in the St. Lawrence River. He was 78.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 03/14/02

Wednesday March 13

SUE THE ONES YOU LOVE: The new chairman of the Orange County Performing Arts Center is suing one of the center’s biggest benefactors. Henry Samueli has raised more than $10 million for the center, but he’s the subject of a stock fraud lawsuit brought in part by OC’s Thomas Thierney. “Some fear that the legal fight will dampen donations and force arts leaders to take sides.” Los Angeles Times 03/12/02

Tuesday March 12

HAMISH HENDERSON, 82: Scottish poet Hamish Hendson has died at the age of 82. “Henderson was, first and last, a poet, and poetry was for them both language rising into song, responsible to moment, people, place and joy. Not for Henderson Auden’s conceit that poetry never made anything happen; he believed that ‘poetry becomes people’ and changes nations, that poetry elevates and gives expression to the deepest and best being of mankind, that poetry is a measure that extends far beyond the written word, that poetry is pleasure and a call to arms.” The Guardian (UK) 03/11/02

ACCIDENTAL TOURIST: Monologuist Spalding Gray is supposed to be on tour now reprising his Swimming to Cambodia piece. But he’s been having trouble concentrating after a nasty car accident in Ireland. “It took an hour for the stupid ambulance to arrive. I ended up in one of those horrible Irish country hospitals and they wanted to leave me there in traction for six weeks.” Chicago Tribune 03/12/02

QUILTING TO THE MUSIC: What do musicians do in the intermissions at the opera? At Chicago Lyric Opera, they make quilts. “The old-fashioned communal handiwork has been warmly embraced by the 31 women in the 75-member orchestra. Twenty-two of them have painstakingly pieced together 24 individual squares and nearly everyone else has sidled up to the frame to do a little needlework.” Chicago Tribune 03/12/02

Sunday March 10

THE LITERARY DIRECTOR: Director Mary Zimmerman, a “41-year-old Chicago stage director, winner of a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship and a full professor of performance studies at Northwestern, has an unusual calling. She is a specialist in literary spectacle. Few working theater directors so completely integrate a life of scholarship and showmanship.” The New York Times 03/09/02

Friday March 8

ROY SITS IN PRISON: Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy is is jail in India. “In a judgment furiously derided by her fellow writers, the two-judge bench said it had no alternative but to jail the 40-year-old novelist because she had shown ‘no remorse or repentance’. Justice RP Sethi said her crime deserved a longer sentence but he was treating her magnanimously because she was a woman. The court fined her 2,000 rupees (£30) and warned her she would be jailed for a further three months if she failed to pay up. Last night Ms Roy, who is in New Delhi’s sprawling Tihar prison, was debating whether to pay the fine or defy the court’s two elderly judges by remaining behind bars.” The Guardian (UK) 03/07/02

GOODWIN HITS BACK: Speaking at a Saint Paul college, embattled historian Doris Kearns Goodwin insisted that her reputation will survive the current plagiarism charges being leveled against her. While admitting that she had made grave mistakes in allowing unattributed passages to make their way into her books, she declared, “I know absolutely that I have dealt fairly and honestly with all my subjects.” Minneapolis Star Tribune 03/08/02

Thursday March 7

HUGHBRIS – CRITIC UNDER GLASS: Australian artist Danius Kesminas compacted the rental car Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes was driving last year when Hughes had a car accident, sealed it in glass, and added objects meant to comment on Hughes’ life. “Mr. Kesminas was able to create Hughbris by tracing the wreckage of Mr. Hughes’s car to a dealer who was about to melt it down. He persuaded the dealer to swap it for three cases of beer and worked for several months to convert the scrap metal into a comment on the event.” The New York Times 03/07/02

GIAN CARLO AT HOME: Is Gian Carlo Menotti the world’s favorite living opera composer? Maybe – probably that’s true in America. In Europe he’s probably better-known as founder of the Spoleto Festival. In Britain he’s not as well known – even though he’s lived there for 30 years. “His 40-room mansion, nestling in a vast estate that rolls away over the horizon, is classic 18th-century, designed by William Adam and his sons, Robert and John.” The Telegraph (UK) 03/07/02

Wednesday March 6

LEBRECHT LEAVES TELEGRAPH: The London Telegraph’s contrarian arts columnist Norman Lebrecht is quitting the paper to jump to the Evening Standard where he’s charged with making over that paper’s cultural coverage. Lebrecht has written many doom and gloom stories about the state of arts business in his nine years at the Telegraph. But he says no one should think him pessimistic about art: “I have never felt more excited about the artistic future – at least for those arts that can open their eyes and master change while time remains.” The Telegraph (UK) 03/06/02

BOOKER WINNER JAILED: “The Booker prize-winning author, Arundhati Roy, has been sentenced to a symbolic one-day prison term and fined 2,000 rupees ($42) after being found guilty of contempt of court. India’s Supreme Court made the ruling in connection with remarks she made about a legal decision to allow work on the controversial Narmada Dam project.” BBC 03/06/02

Tuesday March 5

GOODWIN WITHDRAWS FROM PULITZER JUDGING: Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a member of the board for the Pulitzer Prizes, has withdrawn from participation in the selection of this year’s awards. “Goodwin has been dogged by controversy since she acknowledged that she used a large number of unspecified quotes and other passages from various books, without attribution, in her Kennedy book.” Boston Globe 03/05/02

• LET’S LAY OFF GOODWIN: “In context, Goodwin’s work is massive (1,094 pages in my edition). It is also almost entirely based on original sources never before disclosed – including a vast treasure of family documents and correspondence to which she alone gained access. That point also applies, it is clear from text and footnotes alike, to her presentation on Kathleen Kennedy’s complex life and tragic death. That doesn’t diminish the seriousness of what actually happened, but it puts it in perspective and should have put it to rest.” Boston Globe 03/04/02

SLATKIN STAYING AT NATIONAL: Leonard Slatkin has renewed his contract as music director of the National Symphony for three more years. By then he will have led the orchestra for 10 years. “Slatkin’s present contract was set to expire at the conclusion of the 2002-2003 season.” Washington Post 03/05/02

Monday March 4

HOMAGE A SLAVA: Mstislav Rostropovich has led an extraordinary life. He is a cellist who has not only performed some of the most important music written for the instrument in the 20th century but has also been directly involved in its creation. However, it is as a political dissident – and now almost a modern icon – on a par with Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov that Rostropovich has made the most impact on the wider public consciousness.” The Guardian (UK) 03/02/02

GOING AFTER DORIS: As stories in the press mount up about plagiarizing historians, some anonymous tipsters seem to have a particular in for Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It’s hard not to believe there isn’t something sexist about the relentless lambasting Goodwin’s getting,” writes MobyLives’ Dennis Johnson of the anonymous e-mails he’s been getting about Goodwin. MobyLives 03/04/02

Friday March 1

ROCKWELL OUT AT NYT: “John Rockwell, editor of The New York Times’ Sunday Arts & Leisure section for the past four years, steps down from the influential post today. He will move into the newly created position of senior cultural correspondent, writing cultural news stories and criticism… Under Rockwell’s guidance, it has developed into perhaps the country’s most prominent source of performing arts commentary, with coverage of everything from movies to the performing arts, from the mainstream to the fringe.” Andante 03/01/02