Category: people

87-year-old folk singer Pete Seeger is not what you would call a musical superstar these days, when popular music is defined by a karaoke TV show and round after round of sultry teenage pop stars, but Seeger is enjoying something of a surge in popularity following the release of a Bruce Springsteen album made up entirely of Seeger songs. And if the album’s popularity says anything about music, it might be an echo of Seeger’s longheld belief that good music never goes out of style.

Writing a biography of a living subject is always a challenge, but when the subject is Harper Lee, the famously reclusive author of To Kill A Mockingbird, the challenging becomes nearly impossible. A new volume examines the history of Harper Lee, the author and reluctant celebrity, but capturing the human being is something that may never be done.

It’s a big year for Beckett fans, and critic Ian Brown was looking forward to celebrating the author’s centenary by rereading all the master’s plays, and then writing about the experience. The problem, of course, is that reading Beckett is frequently as difficult and mind-numbing as the writing process apparently was for Beckett himself. By the time he reached literary maturity, “Beckett [was] content to simply slam your head repeatedly into the thick planks of linguistic hopelessness, proving again and again how meaningless meaning can be.”

Philippe de Montebello turned 70 this week, but the milestone was more than just another birthday. It means that Mr. de Montebello, who has led the Met as its director for nearly 29 years, will now be eligible for $3.3 million under a retention agreement with the museum.

“A Hollywood producer who claimed he was creating a TV show about the Department of Homeland Security pleaded guilty on Tuesday to swindling dozens of investors out of millions of dollars. Joseph Medawar, 44, spent much of the $3.4 million he raised from about 50 people on luxury cars and a Beverly Hills mansion for himself and the woman billed as the future star of the show DHS, according to court papers.”

The Legend of Joseph Volpe is well known to anyone with even a casual interest in New York’s Metropolitan Opera, thanks in no small part to Volpe’s own “grandiose self-aggrandizement.” And as the Met prepares to say goodbye to its outsized general director this weekend, Volpe’s own memoir of his time at the helm has just been released. And as you might imagine, a lot of ears are burning in the opera world…

In an era when classical musicians are heavily marketed and encouraged to appeal to the widest possible audience at all times, baritone Matthias Goerne stands out as a performer unwilling to compromise for the sake of pleasing everyone. “You are either fascinated by Goerne or repelled by him. Like Ian Bostridge he polarises opinion. Both singers have pronounced mannerisms, both have highly personal ways of colouring the music, both have a timbre that lends itself to some repertoire but sounds ungainly in the ‘wrong’ music. The bottom line is: the German baritone, like his English tenor counterpart, does not allow you to remain indifferent.”

“Stanley Kunitz, who was one of the most acclaimed and durable American poets of the last century and who, at age 95, was named poet laureate of the United States, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 100… Over the extraordinary span of his career — nearly 80 years — Mr. Kunitz achieved a wide range of expression, from intellectual to lyric, from intimately confessional to grandly oracular. Among other honors, he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1959, the National Book Award in 1995, at age 90, the National Medal of the Arts in 1993 and the prestigious Bollingen Prize in poetry in 1987.”

Stanley Kunitz was more than just a great poet, he was a generous soul who always took the time to help and inspire the next generation, according to those who knew him. But he was also the best critic many of his devotees ever had, and the toughest, always keen to “improve a fellow poet’s work with bold, unflinching editing.”

You would be hard-pressed to find a more celebrated conductor of the moment than Valery Gergiev, and the still-young Russian is mounting a very public push to propel one of his orchestras, St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky, into the top of the international ranks. But “[Gergiev’s] energy has not always endeared him to orchestras or critics, some of whom equate his jet-setting lifestyle with a shallowness of preparation. Stories are legion of Gergiev turning up hours late to rehearsals, giving interviews during concert intervals and holding up the second half, and cutting his schedules so fine that they give orchestral managers panic attacks.”