Category: people

Robert Moog has been designing instruments for 50 years. His most famous instrument, of course, is the Moog synthesizer. “Oh, gosh, it freaked people out. One of the many things you could do was imitate vocal sounds – make it go ‘Weeoooooww’. That really upset. The reaction was a bit like that of primitive cultures believing cameras could catch your soul.”

Prince was the top-selling commercial artist in 2004, earning $65.45 million from $91.63 million in concerts and CD sales last year. Madonna was second on the list, earning $56 million.

Pioneering jazz organist Jimmy Smith has died in Arizona. He “irreversibly placed the Hammond B-3 in the spotlight. Doubly blessed with a quicksilver technique and an unusually advanced harmonic imagination, he invented a brilliant new way of addressing the organ. Emerging as a musical force in the mid-1950s, Mr. Smith brought unprecedented virtuosity to the instrument, inviting comparisons to such bebop piano giants as Bud Powell and Art Tatum.”

Lazar Berman, a big bear of a Russian pianist who was greeted with wild acclaim when he was allowed to travel to the West in 1976, has died at his home in Italy. “A pianist with a bearlike build, a shock of sandy hair and a disarming smile, Mr. Berman had a gentle manner that seemed at odds with his often-muscular approach to the piano. His repertory, though, was broader than his reputation would suggest.”

“On PBS, movie soundtracks, and any number of crossover discs for Sony Classical, violinist Joshua Bell is the boyish, 37-year-old violinist with a matinee-idol following and glamorous girlfriends such as Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth. In concert, he’s a classical violinist in the Jascha Heifetz mold, delivering objective, insightful tours of the great classical masterpieces with one of the cleanest violin techniques in the business.”

“Until January 2004, when he announced his retirement from the concert platform on grounds of ill-health, Lazar Berman played and recorded tirelessly, releasing studio and live performances that soon built up a discography of considerable dimensions. His concerto recordings include fabled accounts of the Rachmaninov Third (with Leonard Bernstein) and Tchaikovsky First (Herbert von Karajan). In an age obsessed with firework virtuosity Lazar Berman brought the requisite flawless technique – but one informed with a powerful Romantic urge. It was a deliberate reaction.”

“Haas’ program cut an idiosyncratic path through the forest of music appreciation, seducing listeners through his humanistic exploration of music and ideas, his irrepressible enthusiasm and gentle humor. His melodious German accent — he was born in the city of Speyer and settled in Detroit in 1936 after fleeing the Nazis — carried Old World authority. But he cut against professorial stuffiness by adopting a casual manner: chatty, anecdotal and off-the-cuff.”

Karl Haas’s syndicated program, “Adventures in Good Music,” for many years attracted the largest audience of any classical music radio program in the world and was carried by hundreds of stations in the United States, Canada, Australia, Mexico and Panama and on Armed Forces Radio. “Karl Haas had the unique knack of being able to convey his love and knowledge of classical music to an audience that, for the most part, wasn’t all that familiar with it. But instead of bringing the music down to them, he brought them up to the music. He was like Leonard Bernstein in that respect.”

Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä has been music director of the Minnesota Orchestra since 2003. “In the past few years, Vänskä has gone from relative obscurity to the front ranks of conductors. In city after city, he has shaken orchestras out of their routines and audiences out of their slumbers.”

Radio broadcaster Karl Haas has died. His “Adventures in Good Music,” an hour-long program in which Haas blended music and talk aimed at casual listeners, was syndicated to hundreds of stations in the United States, Australia, Mexico and Panama and was broadcast by Armed Forces Radio. Haas delighted listeners with his vast musical knowledge and his penchant for punny program titles, such as “The Joy of Sax” and “Baroque and in Debt.”