Category: people

Valery Gergiev “has become, since the deaths of Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, the most talked-about maestro on the planet. Known also as ‘the hardest working man in music,’ Gergiev would have his hands full just being artistic director of the Kirov or Mariinsky Theatre, with its 2,000 employees, including an opera company, a ballet company and a giant orchestra. But when he is not in St. Petersburg, he can often be found in New York, at The Met, where he has been principal guest conductor since 1997 (a new three-year contract is about to be signed), or in Rotterdam, where he has been principal conductor of the Philharmonic since 1995, or at one of several festivals he organizes annually.”

Pianist and condusctor Vladimir Ashkenazy has been named the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s first “artist laureate” in Liverpool’s capital of culture year, 2008.

Pavarotti has caneled upcoming concerts. “Pavarotti’s spokesperson said he had been forced to move the dates as a consequence of recent neck surgery to repair two vertebrae. The opera star was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York on 9 March for the neck operation, described as “routine and regular”.

Judith Regan is “arguably the most successful publisher in the world today, she runs a small imprint with a huge hit rate. So far this year, ReganBooks – part of the HarperCollins empire – has notched up 11 titles in the New York Times bestseller list, including four number ones in the space of six weeks. Even her critics describe her as the smartest woman in publishing. And yet they also have a few more superlatives for her, including the “angriest woman in the media” and – if Vanity Fair magazine is to be believed – a strong candidate for the nastiest person in New York.”

“In a recent essay, one of our finer critics, Lee Siegel, asks what is it with Bellow and a number of non-American writers. Martin Amis had an almost father-son relationship with him (and it can’t be said that this was for lack of a literary parent). James Wood co-taught a class with him at Harvard. Ian McEwan’s Saturday pays homage to a Bellovian inspiration. What other American novelist has had such a direct and startling influence on non-Americans young enough to be his children?”

In keeping with his final wishes, Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes will be blasted out of a cannon. The gun-loving writer will go out with a bang from a cannon mounted inside a 16-metre-high (53ft) sculpture of his trademark “gonzo” fist – a clenched hand on an upthrust forearm with the word gonzo written on it. “It’s expensive, but worth every penny,” his wife, Anita Thompson, said. “I’d like to have several explosions. He loved explosions.”

At his core, Saul Bellow was a teacher, but he was never much for disciples or devotees of his own work. “Bellow had himself well shielded from aspirants. Get in line: wives, children, students, writers, editors, lovers, biographers. I don’t mean this cruelly; it was part of Bellow’s genius. He reminded many people of their incompleteness, perhaps because he knew of his own. There was a rawness to him, almost like a wound, underneath the genteel polish and fiendish wit. His feathered fedora and striped shirts, his elegant manners and silken voice were enameled surfaces, under which he was, like his characters, at sea, the imposing intellect unable to ever lay down any reliable anchor – and not for want of trying, not for lack of greatness.”

“The greatest of late-20th-century American novelists, Saul Bellow, who died Tuesday at 89, resembled his fellow immortals above in a way Americans especially trust. He won the stats game: three National Book Awards, one Pulitzer, and The Big One, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Yet like any cultural giant, Bellow bestowed more prestige on the prizes he received than they conferred on him.”

Stephen Sondheim is as legendary as it gets in theatre circles, yet he hasn’t had a bona fide hit in more than a decade. Yet “even as his own creative powers appear to dim, Sondheim is enjoying a golden age of revivals, reassessments, retrospectives and tributes.” In fact, many Sondheim shows now being revived to great acclaim were popular and critical failures the first time around (Assassins, for instance.) “Wise and mortality-haunted beyond his years, he’s made a career exploring themes that others on Broadway rarely touch — emotional ambiguity, moral ambivalence, the impermanence of love, the terrors of connection, death. But somehow now, more than ever, Sondheim seems a man out of joint with his time.”

Frank Conroy, who “headed the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, published just five books, a relatively small number for a writer of his reputation. But one of them was the lucid and evocative 1967 memoir that has been a model for countless young writers – the sort of book that is passed along like a trade secret. But Mr. Conroy was a personal model as well, a sympathetic but exacting teacher who at Iowa helped shape the early careers” of scores of writers.