Category: people

Oliver Knussen has come a long way since bursting onto the scene as a composing and conducting prodigy at age 14. “Bearded, toweringly tall and nearly as large around, Knussen, 53, lumbers into a room like a slightly disoriented bear. He looks as if he’d just as soon as be eating honey from a crockery jar as writing one of his fastidious musical miniatures.” He has also developed something of a reputation for missing compositional deadlines. However, despite the complexity of some of his work, he has become one of the UK’s most well-known composers, and he is an increasingly welcome guest on the podium of various major orchestras, probably for the quiet passion he brings to the work.

Skitch Henderson, the Grammy-winning conductor who lent his musical expertise to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby before founding the New York Pops and becoming the first “Tonight Show” bandleader, died Tuesday.

Mike Leigh has such appeal that even his untitled projects have fans lining up to buy tickets. “No one questions any more that Leigh is a ‘real’ writer, as they sometimes used to when they discovered how fully his actors participated in the creative process. He thinks the confusion was his fault – until 1987, his credit was always ‘devised and directed by’. Then he switched it to ‘written and directed by’. ‘It should always have been that. Nothing you can do about it now’.”

Noam Chomsky, 76, has been voted the world’s top public intellectual by Prospect magazine, but he has no interest in that. “He believes that there is a misconception about what it means to be smart. It is not a question of wit, as with no 5 on the list (Christopher Hitchens) or poetic dash like no 4 (Vaclav Havel), or the sort of articulacy that lends itself to television appearances, like no 37, the thinking girl’s pin-up Michael Ignatieff, whom Chomsky calls an apologist for the establishment and dispenser of ‘garbage’. Chomsky, by contrast, speaks in a barely audible croak and of his own, largely unsuccessful, television appearances has written dismissively: ‘The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.’ Being smart, he believes, is a function of a plodding, unsexy, application to the facts and ‘using your intelligence to decide what’s right’.”

Embattled former Getty curator Marion True has long had a reputation as an upright, outstanding curator, held in high esteem by those who worked with her. “True isn’t speaking publicly. But friends and colleagues paint a portrait of a woman of ferocious intellect and daunting memory, a vase maven who reads Latin, Greek and Italian and bestows names from mythology on her cats. This Marion True knits expertly, took up the lute as an adult, and always seemed the very picture of prudence. Now True’s calendar reads like the script for a Greek drama.”

“William Hutt, 85, made his farewell appearance at the Stratford Festival [Friday] night, playing Prospero in The Tempest with such passion and commitment that it’s almost as if he wanted to leave a final mark that would never be forgotten on the stage he had trod for so many years. This wasn’t the tentative farewell of an old trouper heading off reluctantly to pasture or the feeble adieu of a once potent warrior. No, Hutt served notice to us all that he was leaving because, like every man, he had the right to choose his moment. His had finally arrived and he wanted it to be a memorable one.”

“When interviewing most singers, you first inquire about their roles, their interpretations, their inspiring teachers. Maybe, if you’re nervy enough, you query them about their love life. When talking with soprano Andrea Gruber, however, you first ask to see the tattoos… Gruber’s candor extends a lot further than a modest display of flesh or an admitted fondness for hip-hop.” She speaks openly of her struggles with drugs and her humiliating ouster from the Metropolitan Opera, and cites ’60s rocker Janis Joplin as one of her vocal influences. And she talks about what it took for her to leave her troubled past behind and rebuild all the bridges she had burned early in her career.

Why are the critics so hard on artist Jack Vettriano? “Vettriano has accused the artistic establishment of disliking ‘rampant heterosexual behaviour’ and of resenting him because of his popularity with the public and because he does not come from a traditional artistic background. The artist defends himself against charges of plagiarism by countering that the reference volumes at the centre of the criticism are there precisely to give people a source of inspiration.”

A portrait long believed to be of William Shakespeare, is not,say experts. “The only evidence is that the portrait is dated 1588 and was painted, according to the inscription, when the sitter was 24 – making him the same age as the playwright. The back of the painting bears the initials WS – but they were added in the 19th century.”

Joan Didion has always been known for her famously refined literary voice, her sentences so polished and buffed that they almost seem to come from another literary era. But when tragedy struck Didion’s family, writing became a way to deal with her grief, and to work through her conflicting emotions. As she puts it, “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”