Category: people

“San Francisco Opera General Director Pamela Rosenberg will return to Germany next year to become intendant, or administrative director, of the Berlin Philharmonic. In making the move, Rosenberg, 60, whose term at the Opera ends Dec. 31, will be going back to the country that has been her home and base of operations for most of her career. Although she was born and raised in California, her children and grandchildren live in Germany… Rosenberg’s appointment in Berlin comes as a surprise. She has little or no experience in the orchestral world, having spent her career in opera. And for an administrator who has always taken a hands-on role in artistic decisions, Rosenberg’s new job will involve a much higher degree of fund raising and financial oversight.”

Author John Irving is working on his 11th and morst complicated novel. “If he weren’t a novelist, the guy could run seminars on the art of discipline. His work ethic has always been prodigious. “How many times can I rewrite this book that is three times longer and five times more complicated than most people’s novels? More times than anybody else. If I value one thing in myself as a writer, it’s that I could work and could learn to be proud of how many times I could revisit the same sentence, the same character.”

Almost as soon as it got started, the trial in Italy of a Getty curator was postponed. “The prosecution of Marion True, the Getty’s curator for antiquities and director of the Getty Villa, will resume Nov. 16, a three judge panel decided. True, 56, is accused of criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and illicit receipt of archeological items purportedly dug up in Italy. The case involves 42 allegedly looted objects and is more than 10 years in the making. Through an attorney, True has asserted her innocence, and the museum has backed her up.”

It’s fashionable for writers from former Soviet block countries to portray themselves as dissidents. But is Ismail Kadare, the Albanian who recently won the international Man Booker Prize such a dissident? “Kadare is no Solzhenitsyn and never has been. If the head of the Union of Writers and the delegate to the People’s Assembly who studied in Moscow was the dissident, who in God’s name supported communism? His secretary? The janitor? His dissident credentials are rubbish, as are those of many Eastern European writers and poets who published and thrived during communism, mixing their literary career with commanding political posts.”

Composers draw inspiration from any number of sources, but current events are usually not terribly high on the list. But for Michael Berkeley, whose new Concerto for Orchestra will get its world premiere at the BBC Proms next week, news of the tsunami devastation in southeast Asia in December 2004 changed the course of his work and led him to embrace a muse many composers – particularly Britons – have turned to over the centuries: namely, the sea.

London theatre legend Dan Crawford, who turned a popular pub into one of the UK’s leading venues for fringe theatre, has died of cancer, aged 62. “The hand-to-mouth existence of the King’s Head, which Crawford founded with his second wife, Joan, in 1970 was part of its charm. Its £60,000 Arts Council grant was cut in 1984 and the place was sustained by Crawford and his third wife, film-maker Stephanie Sinclaire, on minor grants and donations. Meals of variable quality were served before the show. Backstage conditions, said Sheridan Morley – who was involved in several of its productions – made the Black Hole of Calcutta resemble a five-star hotel. Crawford’s programme was a glorious mixture.”

The controversial Van Cliburn Competition winner had suffered a series of strokes over the past decade. “He was always one of a kind, always unique. He was always at the center of attention, always fiery, brilliant. People loved him or hated him, but more people loved him. Whatever one thought of Sultanov’s playing, there are many worse epitaphs than that.”

After 27 years on the job, Ohio Arts Council director Wayne Lawson is retiring. “Lawson, a Cleveland native, raised the council to national prominence during his tenure. His leadership has been widely admired for having seen the council through a rocky political and economic era while simultaneously establishing well-regarded grants programs and arts services.”

Claude Simon, the last French writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 91. He won the Nobel in 1985 He was hailed as a novelist who “incarnates the renewal of French literature in the post-war period .Rejection of conventions, or rather, man’s fundamental originality, are at the heart of his work, the source of his creation.” His books included “The Wind” (1957), and “The Flanders Road” (1960).

For Luciano Pavarotti, the Three Tenors phenomenon was the beginning of the end for a career that went from spectacular to parody. But for Pavarotti’s 3T counterpart, Placido Domingo, the crossover blockbuster was little more than a curious way-station in the midst of a breathless marathon that never seems to slow down. At Domingo’s core appears to be a burning desire to prove himself again and again, and to earn the love of everyone around him. “That sense of obligation, rare in performers (especially among the flighty narcissists who sing opera), is the essence of his character and accounts for the esteem in which he is held. He always justifies the price of the ticket, because he sets out to earn his reputation all over again every time he sings.”