Category: people

“Over the years Les Paul has had a profound influence on music, creating enough inventions to fill a museum. A five-time Grammy winner, he’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame. There’s a Gibson guitar named for him, because he invented it – the Les Paul solid-body electric guitar. He’s got a legion of guitar-playing disciples.”

Composer Frederic Rzewski is “one of the most prominent living American composers and a prodigiously talented pianist, he is also an old-fashioned iconoclast. He’s blunt-speaking, cantankerous — focused on his art and intent on creating it with as much independence as possible from the institutions and bureaucracies that have congealed around it.”

Saxist Sonny Rollins is 74, and remaking his life since his wife of 47 years died in December. “There are some career decisions that I’m facing, that my wife would usually help me with. I can’t divulge what it is, but there’s one big one that some people would say `How could you turn that down?’ But you know, I turned down a lot of things in my career and I think that’s sort of been the subtext of my life — not doing everything that people want you to do for money.”

Thomas Krens’s career, which “seemed to have hit the buffers at the start of the year, when the supremely generous chairman of his trustees, Peter B Lewis, resigned in disgust at his director’s manic, expansionist policies, is back on track. He has come up with the one thing that cannot but command the attention of his severest critics: an unmistakable blockbuster work of art. Krens has been instrumental in the installation of Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time: several hundred tons of raw steel in a sequence of rippling twisted curves.”

American composer David Diamond was “prolific in many forms, including ballets and film scores, but his greatest contributions were his 10 string quartets, a large output of songs and, chiefly, 11 symphonies. He was part of what some considered a forgotten generation of great American symphonists, including Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, William Schuman, Walter Piston and Peter Mennin.”

Mark Swed: “OK, maybe he took himself a little too seriously, but he was a poet — and pope — of the podium. He was also of another era and culture. He represented the sophisticated Italy of impeccable tailoring, impeccable manners, impeccable musicianship. Every note he conducted had to have meaning. Music was a calling, a religion. But as time passed, Giulini has come to seem distant, remote, no longer relevant, maybe even a little quaint. These days, Pierre Boulez’s unsentimental, musically revelatory — and if truth be told, far more impeccably played — Mahler Ninth with Chicago is the recording to have.”

Stretton was “a leading ballet dancer and a successful artistic director of the Australian Ballet, but failed in the larger arena of the Royal Ballet – for a year in 2001-02 he was its most short-lived, and most disastrous, artistic director.”

“All who paid tribute to Ross Stretton, who died yesterday, agreed on one thing: that the former artistic director of the Australian Ballet and, briefly, head of the Royal Ballet, was an intensely private person, so vigilant about his self-imposed line between home and work that even the senior dancers he worked with, such as Steven Heathcote, cannot recall seeing the inside of his Melbourne home.”

As disgraced arts patron Alberto Vilar struggles to free up the $4 million in assets required by the court as part of his $10 million bail agreement, he has apparently decided to allow Christie’s to auction off a part of his personal art collection valued at half a million dollars. “Vilar seemed on the verge of release to home detention and electronic monitoring yesterday when a prosecutor agreed he could be freed even though all the paperwork, including the signatures of four of his friends, was not completed. Judge Kenneth Karas disagreed, though, saying the government would be unable to seize adequate assets if the paperwork were not completed and Vilar fled.”

A Brooklyn performance artist’s latest project has raised the ire of family members of 9/11 victims, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and at least one New York tabloid. Kerry Skarbakka said that he wanted to get inside the minds of the people who died leaping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center before its final collapse, and his chosen method involved donning a business suit and repeatedly leaping from the roof of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (he wore a harness), while photographers below took pictures of his fall.