“Claims Adjusting Group has reserved $3.1 million to pay Chor Ng, who owns the [Oakland] Fruitvale District warehouse and adjacent properties, to cover her basic property loss and liability policy. … However, Ng’s $6 million liability insurance maximum will likely never make its way to the dozens of victims suing her and other agencies for the deadly fire, one insurance expert says.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Seattle Symphony Hires Thomas Dausgaard As Next Music Director
Meet the new boss, same as the old substitute boss: Dausgaard, a 54-year-old Dane who takes over from Ludovic Morlot in 2019, has been the SSO’s principal guest conductor since 2014. “It was his 2015 Seattle Symphony Sibelius Festival performances,” writes Melinda Bargreen, “that made the tall, silver-haired Dane a popular figure among the city’s classical-music lovers, with standing ovations after every performance, and the kind of connection with players and audiences that conductors dream of.”
New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Give Up On $500M Renovation Of Geffen Hall
Both organizations have new presidents – Debora Spar at Lincoln Center and Deborah Borda at the Phil – who did not like what they saw when they looked at the plan’s costs, schedules (which were getting longer), and fundraising prospects. Said Spar, “There was a general sense that the project had just gotten too complicated.”
Supreme Court To Decide If US Terrorism Victims Can Have Antiquities From Iran Seized As Compensation
The plaintiffs were injured in a 1997 attack by Hamas in Jerusalem and received a federal court ruling that the government of Iran, as a funder of Hamas, was liable for their injuries. In 2003, plaintiffs won a $71 million default judgment against Iran (which refused to participate in the case), and they tried to have seized Persian antiquities on loan to several US museums, including the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. As Martha Lufkin reports, the case now turns on the terrorism exception in sovereign-immunity law and on what qualifies as “commercial activity.”
Orlando Ballet Searching For Yet Another Executive Director
“The organization, which has faced significant financial struggles, announced Tuesday it is looking for its eighth leader in six years. The difference this time, officials say, is that the ballet has reached a more stable financial position – thanks in part to work by Caroline Miller, who after 16 months in the top job, resigned for personal reasons.” (In this case, that’s not a “to spend more time with family” euphemism.)
Lang Lang Prepares To Give His First Piano-Five-Hands Concert
For Wednesday night’s Carnegie Hall season-opening gala with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chinese superstar was booked to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Chick Corea in a seldom-heard two-piano version. Then, this past spring, Lang Lang injured his left arm – he says it was by practicing Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand too hard. So he’s bringing in a 14-year-old protégé to play the left-hand part alongside him.
The Million-Dollar Prize For Philosophers Has A New Winner
The Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture, inaugurated last year as a sort of Nobel equivalent, goes this year to University of Cambridge professor Onora O’Neill, known for her work in international justice, human rights, and bioethics.
The Six Reasons Dance Training Makes You A Better Person
Steve Zee: “As a dance educator, I also take comfort in the fact that high-quality dance training helps shape students into genuinely good people. … These are the lessons dance teaches that help make students into better humans.”
What Exactly Is ‘Cultural Memoir’? Margo Jefferson Explains
“For me, cultural memoir is a mutating definition. I first began to think in that way when I was working with the boundaries between criticism – literary, cultural, or whatever – which I had done for so many years, and memoir. I realised that I needed, in some way, to merge and to keep those two forms in dialogue, interrogating – as we like to say – each other. So, I began to think of cultural memoir. Initially I was just working obviously with non-fiction but, as you can see, fiction and theatre make their way in here, too.”
J.G. Ballard, Prophet Of Climate Change?
“Consider the images coming out of South Florida” – let alone Puerto Rico – “the past few weeks: sailboats capsized and clotting on the shore; high-rises looking on, humiliated by their reflection in the flooded streets; palm carnage. These could easily be used to illustrate J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World.” Hunter Braithwaite makes the case.