Category: people

Daniel Barenboim remembers his good friend Edward Said: “Edward Said was, for many, a great thinker, a fighter for the rights of his people, and an incomparable intellectual. But for me, he was always, really, a musician, in the deepest sense of the term.”

Music agent Herbert Breslin’s memoir takes aim at Pavarotti. Breslin writes that “in the early days, Pavarotti was a “dream client” but artistic and financial success nurtured complacency, Breslin says, citing his client’s increasing unwillingness to learn roles, memorise librettos or even turn up for performances. As the years went on, it looked more and more like he was taking this gorgeous career of his … and flushing it down the toilet.”

How much can a mayor affect the landscape of the city they serve? Quite a bit, writes Randy Gragg. Portland, Oregon’s Vera Katz has transformed the city during her time in office. “She helped lay the foundation for a new Portland, newcomers and prospering longtimers in equal parts.”

Daniel Harding is the definition of a conducting prodigy if ever there was one. Handpicked by Simon Rattle as the next great maestro while still a teenager, Harding’s rise through the normally sluggish world of conducting has been legendary. Now, in an unexpected move, he is coming home to London, there to assume the post of principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Harding had been known to be looking for a full music directorship, but he will conduct a dozen weeks a year with the LSO, and will tour with the ensemble as well, which is nearly as heavy a workload as that assumed by most music directors.

For the first time, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has named a woman as its president. Emily Kernan Rafferty, 55, has been with the Met for 28 years, “and is credited with leading the creation of the Met’s Web site, and building its membership.” She will take over in January, and will oversee the Met’s $155 million renovation.

At some indeterminate point in the last decade, Wynton Marsalis became the official spokesman for serious jazz. It’s an unlikely position for a man who had previously split the jazz world down the middle with his lofty pronouncements about the form, and his dismissal of many modern performers and their influences. But today, “with Jazz at Lincoln Center as the most powerful nonprofit jazz institution in the world, with a responsibility to its donors for the $128 million it took to build the halls, his declarations, and his answers to criticism, have become temperate and more like coalition-building.”

The British composer Sir John Tavener is famously devoted to the Orthodox Church that has inspired nearly all of his music. Or he was, until a recent rift with his spiritual advisor soured him on Orthodoxy. Now, he calls the strict musical code by which he used to live a “tyranny,” and his latest work is based on Islamic texts. “A forthcoming work he is planning to write, as if to emphasise his new-found freedom from Orthodox principles, is a theatrical composition based on the life of Krishna and influenced by Mozart’s Magic Flute.”

Daniel Barenboim has been the subject of many rumors over the past year, with speculation rampant about his recent back injury, his supposed tendency to overcommit himself, and his decision to leave the music directorship of the Chicago Symphony in 2006. Barenboim insists that there is no more than meets the eye in any of these issues. Still, he admits frustration with the direction the CSO is taking. “I disagree with the way [the CSO brain trust], and America, in general, look at the role of music director. The symphony orchestra culture in America has changed over the last 10 years. [Subscriptions] are down because music has lost a large part of its place in American society. That’s an illness, but we are dealing with the symptoms in the wrong way.”

“Throughout most of his high-profile life, it seemed that Salvador Dalí had come from the moon, by way of the Walt Disney studios and some bar in a swank Paris hotel: art’s original Space Oddity, the super salesman of Surrealism… But you only have to travel the dusty back roads well inland from the tourist havens clogging Spain’s Costa Brava area north of Barcelona to come across stark evidence of the roots of so much of his imagery.” Surrealism seems to be hot again in the eyes of both critics and collectors, and a reexamination of Dali’s influences and impact is a natural offshoot of the revival.

“Sandy Dijsktra has been called an über agent as much for the passion she brings to her projects as for the authors she represents. Apparently her passion also extends to politics.” A recent e-mail sent to all her clients announced that she will not be sending out a holiday card this year, so that she can put the money it would cost towards supporting presidential candidate John Kerry. And while it may not be a surprise that a Californian working in the arts industry would be supporting a Democrat, Dijkstra has certainly taken an unusual step, particularly for an agent who has a predilection for “recruiting authors from the ranks of journalists.”