Category: people

Conductor Lorin Maazel has canceled performances with the Sydney Symphony to have unexpected surgery. “Maazel withdrew as music director of an epic outdoor production of Carmen for the Seville International Music Festival last year due to emergency cataract surgery. The Sydney Symphony did not comment on whether his latest medical treatment involved similar problems, except to say that he was expected to make a full recovery.”

“Cementing his position as one of America’s leading 20th century literary voices, Philip Roth will see the nonprofit Library of America publish an eight-volume collection of his novels and stories beginning later this summer. Roth, a two-time National Book Award winner, joins Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty as the only American writers to have their complete works preserved by the Library of America during their lifetimes… Initially backed by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the Library of America published its first books in 1982 on a mission to preserve what it considers the most significant of American writing.”

Magazine publisher John Harold Johnson has died of heart failure, aged 87. Johnson was the most influential African-American in the history of American publishing, having created and nurtured the widely influential magazine, Ebony, and he later branched out into radio programs aimed at both black and integrated audiences. He resisted calls from within the black community to make his offerings more militant, and instead chose to work within the white-dominated media world and change it by his very success.

Ever since legendary violinist Isaac Stern passed away in 2001, a vicious court fight has been raging between the executor of Stern’s will and the performer’s children, who believe that he was taken advantage of on his deathbed and convinced to sign over most of his property to his wife of five years. The deathbed transfer led directly to the semi-secret sale of Stern’s priceless violins by the executor, a fact which his children learned about only when tipped off by a musician in the Philadelphia Orchestra. This week, a Connecticut court ruled in favor of the children and ordered executor William Moorhead to pay back $562,000 in fees he had charged to the Stern estate.

Mel Gibson has been asked to stage the Stations of the Cross live in Sydney. “Gibson’s staging the Stations of the Cross is part of Sydney’s pitch for Catholicism’s World Youth Day, which a leading Vatican observer claims has already been secretly awarded to the city. According to bid documents sent to the Vatican and obtained by the Herald, Gibson would be asked to create the Stations of the Cross as he did in his film The Passion of the Christ.”

“Among a group of older Cuban performers recruited by U.S. musician Ry Cooder, Ferrer performed on the “Buena Vista Social Club album” that won a Grammy in 1999, and was among those appearing in the film of the same name.”

Conductor Valery Gergiev is on a mission. “When I meet [Putin] I tell him, ‘Do we have a chance to improve dramatically the situation of the provincial orchestras in Russia?’ ” He asks ‘What is the situation?’, and I tell him we lost, in the 1980s and 1990s especially, many great teachers, many great musicians, not only famous ones but also . . . thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of professional musicians.”

The artistic duo known as Gilbert and George can occasionally seem less like artists than like impish schoolchildren, even thirty years into their impressive career. “For more than three decades Gilbert and George have made a profession out of being naughty. Their art has dealt with politics of all types: economic, social, sexual. Combining photography with performance, they have embraced pornography, pandemic diseases like AIDS, vaudeville and scatology.” Their act seems to be wearing well: their recent exhibition at the Venice Biennale was a huge hit, and many of the works from that show have already been snapped up by major museums.

The soprano is aware of her voice changing: “A little bit. I’m not 20 any more. I can hear it. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It’s a little broader than it used to be, has more volume in the lower and middle registers. The vibrato changes too. Everything is a bit bigger, a bit slower, but not in an embarrassing way. I’m enjoying using my voice in a different way. I’m using more of it and I am enjoying that. Ten or 15 years ago, using the mass of the voice didn’t interest me. Then I was looking for a thinner, more instrumental sound. I did a lot of baroque music and Mozart. I’m still doing baroque and Mozart but not as much, and therefore I can use my voice in a different way.

The first black musician to play in the Cleveland Orchestra has died. Donald White, who was hired by music director George Szell in 1957, played 39 seasons in Cleveland, and participated in a groundbreaking tour of the American Deep South in the 1960s, during which the orchestra threatened to cancel concerts if White was barred from segregated venues. He died this past weekend, aged 80.