Category: people

Condustor Leonard Slatkin has transformed Washington DC’s National Symphony, which he has led since 1996. “He is probably the best public “explainer” of music since Leonard Bernstein, able to prepare a dubious audience for even the most recondite new composition; he speaks in full paragraphs, with wit and incision. In short, Slatkin is what the trade calls a “good citizen” — and in a time when classical music is struggling on almost every level, his steady, friendly advocacy takes on renewed importance.”

“Dexter Bullard, 38, is an anomaly in Chicago: a major director, steeped in improv, who has yet to work with Steppenwolf (beyond a couple of workshops) or the Goodman, the Court, Writers’ Theatre, Victory Gardens or Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Nor has he really tried to work at any of those places, keeping busy at other venues, including A Red Orchid, Famous Door, Next Lab, American Theatre Company and other low-paying, high-freedom outposts.”

Pianist Leon Fliesher is back playing with two hands. The cure for the ailment that robbed him of the use of his right hand for so many years? Rolfing and botox. “Fleisher’s more specific medical crusade concerns what lies beneath his carpal tunnel syndrome, which is focal dystonia: His brain sends unwanted signals that leave his fingers involuntarily contracting. A specific form of rolfing, administered twice a month, gives his muscles the elasticity to perform better and to take in the effects of the botox, which erects a barrier to the unwanted contraction messages from the brain.”

“The announcer who popularised the phrase ‘Elvis has left the building’ has died in a crash, on his way home from an Elvis convention in California.”

Brazil’s Supreme Court has dismissed obscenity charges against opera director Gerald Thomas. “After an August 2003 performance of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” at Rio de Janeiro’s municipal theatre, Thomas shocked the audience and members of his cast by pulling down his pants and displaying his buttocks in response to jeers at the curtain call.”

Author Louis De Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, has lost 50 pages of his next book by leaving them on a laptop computer and going to the Edinburgh festival.

The death of film music composer Elmer Bernstein marks the end of an era. “Over the years, Bernstein worked with many of the greatest directors and, with a fair number of them, he collaborated several times, including three films with Martin Scorsese. But he became increasingly disillusioned with the ignorance and crude commercialism of Hollywood’s approach to music.”

A new book about producer Harvey Weinstein details “with some appalled glee the food stains on Weinstein’s shirts, the thuggish threats to journalists, the thrown telephones, the impossible demands to directors, the bullying of staff. He talks of Weinstein as an ‘artist of anger’ and as ‘the 800lb gorilla in the corner’. Really, though, he is his Moby Dick, his white whale. No matter how often the journalist seems to have harpooned his target, Harvey keeps emerging from the deep, clutching a contract and a side order of fries.”

“The director of the £46m Baltic arts gallery in Gateshead is on police bail after being arrested after an alleged indecent assault in London, it emerged yesterday. Stephen Snoddy, 44, has been suspended from his job running the new gallery, which has been dubbed the Tate Modern of the north, while the investigation continues.”

“Milosz was always worried that he had betrayed his homeland by leaving it and was glad to return to newly free Poland for the final years of his life. He was welcomed as a literary giant. But like many east European intellectuals who flourished in adversity, he had little to say directly about the new era of uncaptive minds. ‘Intellectuals have a certain image of things and don’t know very well what is going on beneath, in people’s heads, after those decades of totalitarian smashing and modelling’.”