Category: people

British violinist and conductor Iona Brown, who led the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields for decades, first as concertmaster and then as music director, has died at the age of 63. Brown, who also led the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for a time, was renowned worldwide for her skills as a violinist, and blazed a trail for female conductors at a time when sexism was still rampant in the industry.

“Jonathan Kramer, a composer and musical theorist, died on June 3 at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was 61 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was leukemia, said his wife, Deborah Bradley. Mr. Kramer, a professor of composition and theory at Columbia University, wrote eclectic music that often drew from sources as disparate as Baroque music and jazz.”

“Mr. Charles reshaped American music for half a century as a singer, pianist, songwriter, bandleader and producer. He was a remarkable pianist, at home with splashy barrelhouse playing and precisely understated swing. But his playing was inevitably overshadowed by his voice, a forthright baritone steeped in the blues, strong and impure and gloriously unpredictable.”

“Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times’ fanciful architecture critic, has told his bosses that he’s getting tired of his current duties and intends to step down before long.”

“Stalin loved movies, but he was much more than a movie-buff. The new Communist Party archives in Moscow, and the recently opened personal papers of Stalin, reveal that he fancied himself a super-movie-producer/director/screenwriter as well as supreme censor, suggesting titles, ideas and stories, working on scripts and song lyrics, lecturing directors, coaching actors, ordering re-shoots and cuts and, finally, passing the movies for showing.”

David George Holt concocted an elaborate fraud in old books. “In e-mails heavily salted with charming, European-seeming malapropisms, he conjured aliases such as elderly Swiss antiquities dealer “Frederik Buwe” and offered precious folios at remarkably low prices, book dealers’ records show. “Dave J. Masd,” allegedly a Holt alias, advertised a vellum leaf from an illuminated mid-13th Century Bible for only $211 and a copy of the Giant Bible of Mainz (1452-53) in good condition, all pages complete, for $224.”

The Five Browns are one record label’s latest hope for a classical music marketing success. The five siblings, Juilliard-trained pianists all, are talented, unusual, and good-looking in a way that is sure to make their album covers attractive to consumers. Oh, and they’re Mormon, and see their music as a chance to bring the message of the Latter Day Saints to the world.

A cultural scene as vast and diverse (and expensive) as New York’s could not survive without major benefactors, or without benefactors who are proficient at attracting other benefactors. And in a city where figures like $1 billion are thrown around as fundraising targets without anyone so much as batting an eyelash, the generosity and fundraising talent of such philanthropists are in high demand. The cultural “power couple of the moment” in the Big Apple consists of Jerry Speyer and Katherine Farley, who between them hold the key to many of Manhattan’s most ambitious cultural projects.

David Kipen is a fan of a new book about two very different critics. “Craig Seligman’s new book about Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag is the sassiest, classiest work of popular criticism since Nick Hornby’s “Songbook.” Kael might have praised it as “fizzy,” Sontag could call it “serious” and neither would be wrong. But “Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me” transcends these catchwords to present a funny, smart diptych of two bookish girls from California who took Manhattan and knocked it sideways.”

Two experts in Asperger’s Syndrome say that Michelangelo might have suffered from the condiction. They describe him as “strange, without affect, and isolated,” adding that he was “preoccupied with his own private reality. His single-minded work routine, unusual lifestyle, limited interests, poor social and communication skills and various issues of life control appear to be features of high-functioning autism or Asperger’s Syndrome.”