Category: people

Short of stature, round of figure, Judith never merely walked into a theater; rather, she marched in like an officer about to review the troops. She was a complicated, passionate woman who seemed to have no filtering mechanism whatsoever. If something displeased her, her face would redden in an instant. If one of her favorites succeeded in a performance — people like Margie Jenkins, Ashley Wheater, Joe Goode, Joanna Berman — she was on her feet before the curtain fell, yelling “bravo” with no apparent regard to whatever is meant by “critical distance.”

Cinncinnati jazz radio host Oscar Treadwell was a legend in the business. “He and his passion for music were immortalized by some of jazz’s masters. Charlie Parker composed “An Oscar for Treadwell,” which he recorded in 1949 with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Buddy Rich. In 1950, Wardell Gray recorded “Treadin’ with Treadwell.” And in 1955, Monk sent Mr. Treadwell a copy of his composition “Oska T” for use as a theme song.”

Merce Cunningham is headed to Miami next year to help open the new Miami Performing Arts Center. But he’s not just doing dance. “This creative synergy, a hallmark of Cunningham’s career, will result in two MOCA exhibitions, an original work of dance and visual art in collaboration with a Miami artist, dance and music performances, classes and lectures.”

McGahern was “arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett.”

For 16 years, Erika Sunnegardh studied singing, but didn’t get very far. Then in 2004 the Swedish-American soprano made her professional debut. Eighteen months later, she’s on stage at the Metropolitan Opera…

“Well, I was thinking about how I had developed as a person,” Dromgoole says. “And in the absence of religion, which we never had very explicitly as a family, and in the absence of politics, which I didn’t develop until I was older, and in the absence of obsessions like football, the largest voice of authority and the most important thing by which I could try to discover who I was and what I felt — well, that was Shakespeare.”

Conductor James Levine is out of the hospital and recuperating at his New York home following shoulder surgery that will keep him out of action until the summer. Levine, who tore his rotator cuff in a fall following a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert last month, has canceled all his bookings through the spring, but hopes to be ready for the BSO’s Tanglewood season, which begins in July.

“James Undercofler, the innovative and influential dean of the Eastman School of Music, has been reappointed to a five-year term at the conservatory… Undercofler has been a driving force behind Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership, a first-of-its-kind center providing students with cutting-edge music and business skills for the 21st century. He also has played an influential role in the recent expansion of Eastman’s Community Music School, and in last year’s multi-million-dollar renovation of the Eastman Theatre.”

Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, who led the Philadelphia Orchestra for much of the 1990s and is known in Europe as one of the finest operatic conductors of his generation, is reported to have officially retired from the podium. “The 82-year-old Sawallisch has canceled a series of appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra and other groups this season because of an unspecified illness… He has suffered from orthostatic hypotension, a blood pressure problem, in the past.”

The opera director Otto Schenk, 76, says that his current production of Don Pasquale will be the last work he does for New York’s Metropolitan Opera – in fact, it took some prodding from the Met’s Joseph Volpe and the presence of legendary Anna Netrebko to coax Schenk out of his semi-retirement at all. “He is a link to an earlier, even a prewar tradition of German-language theater, down to the earthy dry humor that harks back to cabaret traditions of the 1920’s.”