Category: people

Stuarti “appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, including “Around the World in 80 Days,” “South Pacific” and “Kiss Me Kate.” He performed under the names Larry Lawrence and Larry Stuart before taking the name Enzo Stuarti, his son said. Stuarti was a frequent guest on television talk shows, including the Ed Sullivan Show, the Mike Douglas show and the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”

“Alan Fletcher, head of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Music, has been named the new president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Music Festival and School.”

Northern Ireland playwright Gary Mitchell has left Belfast and gone in to hiding, claiming harrassment. He was attacked and his car petrol-bombed by masked men on November 23rd. “There is a very small minority who are jealous and angry at someone else being successful, who are using every opportunity to lash out at me and my family. Images of myself winning awards in Dublin is enough to give these people the impression I’ve sold out or done something against them.”

The vote was taken by the country’s French television broadcaster. “The broadcaster said Brel edged out the popular late King Baudouin, who came in second. Father Damien, a 19th-century priest who cared for lepers in Hawaii, was third. Others in the running included painter René Magritte and former bicycling champion Eddy Merckx.”

Violinist David Ewart, 48, was listed in critical but stable condition with second- and third-degree burns to his face, hands, chest and back. The fire “also destroyed one of Ewart’s prized possessions, a violin dating from the 1770s. The maker of the instrument was not immediately known. Ewart’s father, Hugh Ewart, concertmaster emeritus of the Portland Symphony, suffered facial burns and a broken nose.”

Pianist Alexei Sultanov’s motor skills may have been destroyed by a crippling series of strokes, but the part of his brain that allowed music to reach him survived, and he fought to regain his ability to play the piano, even as more basic tasks such as walking or speaking eluded him. “On a cellular level, the musical brain remains virtually uncharted territory. The calamity of Sultanov’s strokes, though, showed how quickly a virtuoso’s brain can be robbed of its gifts–and how slowly and painstakingly they can be reclaimed.”

Alexei Sultanov was 7 when he began performing as a soloist with professional orchestras in his native Uzbekistan. He was 19 when he became the youngest pianist ever to win the prestigious Van Cliburn Competition. And he was barely 30 when five simultaneous strokes wracked his brain and left him a shell of the energetic young musician he had always been. “Though doctors eventually stanched the hemorrhage, the damage was done. The strokes destroyed portions of his brain that are central to normal life and to the extraordinarily complex task of making music.”

Alexei Sultanov might have given up on life, let alone music. After his strokes left him a broken man, he couldn’t even bear the sound of the music which had once been his whole world. But a determined physical therapist refused to accept her patient’s defeat, and demanded that he relearn not only the basic skills of human movement, but the intricate art that had made him famous. Sultanov resisted at first, fighting against the humiliation of struggling to bang out a single melody line on a keyboard he could no longer recognize. But then, that Christmas…

Architect James Ingo Freed, who designed Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Museum and San Francisco’s Main Public Library, has died aged 75 of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. Freed was a longtime business partner of architect I.M. Pei, and though he never reached the “superstar” status of some of his contemporaries, he was responsible for some of his era’s most beloved buildings.

Benjamin Forgey says that James Ingo Freed’s legacy rings particularly true in the nation’s capital, where Freed’s vision for the Holocaust Museum became the cornerstone of the architect’s legacy. “As a man, [Freed] combined lots of complex opposites. He was incredibly intense yet delightfully considerate. He was brave — in the graceful way he refused to give in to the debilitation of Parkinson’s disease. His movements had almost a dancer’s grace. He was gentle yet fierce. His talents and growing independence, however, had been hidden. The Holocaust Museum changed that. It was, indubitably, Freed’s building from start to finish.”