Category: people

The author of a legendary and long-running series of police novels centered on the fictional 87th Precinct has died. Ed McBain, whose real name was Evan Hunter, wrote his first crime novel in 1956, and never looked back, amassing a huge following over the subsequent half-century of work. “How long the Ed McBain books will hold their huge audience is anyone’s guess. Mystery writers go out of style… James Ellroy’s intense, dark stories of Los Angeles have nothing in common with the formulaic Ed McBain stories. But there you are in the airport, and your flight has been delayed. You’ve read the papers and had a drink. Luckily, there on the newsstand shelf are half a dozen Ed McBains. Relax: Detective Carella will take good care of you for the next three hours.”

“The unexpected news that the Russian super-conductor Valery Gergiev has added Britain’s top orchestra, the London Symphony, to his bulging portfolio is still reverberating round the classical-music world… Gergiev is clearly delighted to be chosen by the LSO, but his real passion is reserved for the Kirov Opera and Ballet. With a single-mindedness that borders on obsession, Gergiev has thrown himself into creating a company to rival, and many would say, overtake, the Bolshoi in Moscow.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made a $20 million personal donation to the city’s arts groups through his preferred vehicle, the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Bloomberg has long been known as one of New York’s leading philanthropists, and while his donations to Carnegie have officially been anonymous, his willingness to spend his own considerable wealth on the arts has long been an open secret. “While the grants through Carnegie represent just a portion of the mayor’s overall philanthropy – last year he gave a total of about $140 million in donations to more than 800 institutions and groups – they are often vital to local groups that are struggling with fund-raising and, sometimes, have also struggled with budget cuts imposed by the Bloomberg administration.”

Philanthropist Alberto Vilar was good to Los Angeles Opera, giving it millions. Now that he’s defaulted on his gifts and got in trouble with the law, “it’s as if the man who once posed with Domingo, celebrity conductors and members of the board, who delighted in publicly handing out checks and watched performances intently from a seat of honor in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, had never set foot in town.”

Puccini’s granddaughter is protesting a plan to build a theatre at the composer’s home. “Simonetta Puccini said the proposed building of a 3,200- seat theatre with shops, parking spaces and a “panoramic elevator”, at Torre Del Lago in Tuscany would ruin the countryside that so inspired Puccini.”

It’s been ten years since Keith Lockhart took over the Boston Pops Orchestra. “Now, at 45, having led more than 800 Pops performances, Lockhart feels the weight of his increasingly demanding schedule and the economic pressures facing the orchestra.”

Norman mailer has taken on New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. “In an interview with Rolling Stone [Mailer] called the Japanese-American critic ‘a one-woman kamikaze’ and ‘a token’ minority hire.” He says “authors do like to reviewed on publication day, not two weeks earlier with a heinously bad review … This is what Ms. Kakutani has been doing to my books for many years now, and that may not be politically correct, but it sure is foul.”

“Composer Robert Sirota, who has directed the Peabody Conservatory for 10 years, has been named president of Manhattan School of Music, succeeding Marta Casals Istomin… Sirota, who has written solo and chamber music works, studied at the Juilliard School, the Oberlin Conservatory and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in composition. He has been a member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute since 1995, when he became director.”

“The Mississippi native and longtime Memphis resident wrote a stirring, three-volume, 3,000-page history of the Civil War, as well as six novels.”

“Isidore Cohen, a violinist who, as a member of the Juilliard String Quartet and the Beaux Arts Trio, was an important chamber music performer and a teacher, died on Thursday in the Bronx.”