Category: people

The directorship of New York’s City Planning Department is not ordinarily a high-profile position, but Amanda Burden is taking a stab at making it one. “She has not only repeatedly sent architects back to the drawing board, but also spurred commercial development in once-dormant neighborhoods… Compared with a Robert Moses, the think-big public works czar who imposed a sweeping vision on highways and parks across the city from the 1930’s to the 60’s, Ms. Burden might be considered an aesthetic watchdog,” imposing an unfamiliar discipline on development projects in a city whose style has always been “bigger, not better.”

“Susan Sontag passed an extraordinary amount of her life in the pursuit of private happiness through reading and through the attempt to share this delight with others. For her, the act of literary consumption was the generous parent of the act of literary production. She was so much impressed by the marvelous people she had read—beginning with Jack London and Thomas Mann in her girlhood, and eventually comprising the almost Borgesian library that was her one prized possession—that she was almost shy about offering her own prose to the reader. Look at her output and you will see that she was not at all prolific.”

Susan Sontag was an intellectual original. Her work “made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term.”

“The writer, who had suffered from leukaemia, died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Calling herself an “obsessed moralist”, Sontag was the author of 17 books and a lifelong human rights activist.”

Alice Munro’s latest book is set to be her most successful yet. The reviews are rapturous, and it’s selling well. “So late in life,” she admits, it has occurred to her to stop writing. Working on Runaway, Munro was tempted by the idea, she says, of becoming a “normal person.” It hasn’t come down to that yet, because, for one thing, she thinks her best work is still ahead of her. “This, of course, is a fallacy that probably keeps you going,” she says

Giuseppe di Stefano was moved to a Milan hospital from Kenya Thursday, three weeks after being attacked by armed robbers. “The retired 83-year-old tenor, famous for his duets with Maria Callas, was in critical condition prior to his departure from a hospital in Mombasa.”

Soprano Renata Tebaldi (who died last weekend) was a major influence on opera. “Tebaldi’s use of tone as a primary expressive device dictated much of what opera singing is about today. While Callas’ voice was the messenger of her character (often with a dark message, indeed), Tebaldi’s rich, sumptuous soprano was an end in itself. Kiri Te Kanawa and Kathleen Battle are her descendants, as are, to a lesser extent, Jessye Norman and Renée Fleming.”

“Cooler heads could fault her for what often seemed incomplete technique, some strident full-voiced top notes when the vocal line took her above high B-flat, and occasional lapses in pitch. But most opera buffs and critics found it impossible to have a cool head when listening to Renata Tebaldi.”

“Tebaldi’s voice — impossibly smooth, florid and welling with poignancy — touched people to their souls. In the late 1950s, there were more than 100 Renata Tebaldi Music Clubs throughout Europe and America, and she retained a following long after her best years were behind her.”

The great opera singer, a rival of Maria Callas, died in San Marino. “Born in Pesaro, she made her debut in 1944 but her career took off after performing at a concert to mark the re-opening of La Scala, Milan, in 1946. She sang at the great opera houses of the world but retired in the 1970s due to problems with her vocal chords.”