Category: people

As the Colorado Symphony prepares for the arrival of new music director Jeffrey Kahane, comparisons to outgoing MD Marin Alsop are inevitable. Alsop rose to international acclaim during her time in Denver, and the CSO caught some of the attention as a result. Kahane, by contrast, has never topped any overblown lists of conductors thought to be “the next big thing,” but he is quietly beloved by musicians, audiences, and administrators nearly everywhere he conducts. He doesn’t micromanage his orchestras from a musical standpoint, but behind the scenes, he seems to have his hands in nearly every facet of the organization.

To say that Istvan Kantor was not a popular selection as the winner of this year’s Governor-General’s Award in visual and media arts would be an understatement. “Even from within the art-world ranks, the reaction to the announcement was mixed, with many opining that Kantor had more of a genius for self-promotion than art-making.” Some call Kantor a neo-Dadaist genius – others sniff that he’s merely neo-annoying and full of himself. Trying to keep an open mind is critic Sarah Milroy, who, after viewing the artist’s latest film, is wondering “what would happen if Kantor stopped screaming and started thinking instead.”

Leonard Bernstein’s first national television appearance, on the program “Omnibus,” saw him emerge as America’s foremost bridger of the gap between high art and popular culture. But strangely, the “Omnibus” shows aired only once, and the tapes have never been released to the public. “The reason is the entire “Omnibus” series, which ran almost continuously from 1952 to 1961, is stored on kinescopes in Wesleyan University’s cinema archives and is the victim of a legal stalemate between Wesleyan and the families of Bernstein and “Omnibus” creator Robert Saudek.”

Minnesota state legislator Cy Thao is a prominent figure in the Twin Cities’ large population of Hmong, a nomadic people of Chinese origin who fled to the U.S. from Laos following the Vietnam War. As a lawmaker, Thao is one of only two Hmong officeholders in America (the other is also from St. Paul,) and is steadily gaining influence at the Capitol. But Thao is also an accomplished artist who is determined to break the thousand-year cycle of lost Hmong history through his work. This week, a series of 50 of Thao’s oil paintings goes on display at a Minneapolis museum.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, president and CEO of the Blackstone Group, is the leading candidate to be the new chairman of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. “Schwarzman, 57, runs a firm that has invested more than $60 billion in scores of companies across the globe. The Financial Times of London last week called him “one of the most powerful dealmakers in the world.”

“Officially, Andy Goldsworthy is a leading member of the Earth Art movement, which was founded in the long-haired 60’s and is invariably billed in textbooks as an attempt to free the art object from the marketplace. Almost disappointingly free of self-importance, he describes his most formative experience as the time he spent as a farm laborer in Leeds, England, where he came to think of stacked bales of hay as ‘minimalist sculptures.’ Curiously enough, these days, Goldsworthy is more valued in America than he is in his native England, perhaps because the London art world tends to disparage the notion of landscape as too gentlemanly and old-fashioned, too English.

James Roos, who was the Miami Herald’s classical music critic for three decades, died Thursday after a 17-month battle with brain cancer, one day after his 60th birthday.

“Mexican opposition politicians are appealing to Latin America’s best-known writer, Gabriel García Márquez, to mediate in the diplomatic crisis that has taken their country’s traditionally good relations with Cuba to the brink of collapse.”

Saxophonist Oliver Lake is a big name in jazz circles, having made his name as a founding member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group, and as 1/4 of the World Saxophone Quartet. So what is he doing hanging out with a bunch of middle school kids in inner-city Minneapolis?

Oboist Alex Klein is retiring from the Chicago Symphony because of a muscle-control disorder. “I just couldn’t understand why my fingers were not going the way I wanted. So I practiced harder, which only made it worse. I acquired a lot of secondary problems, including muscle tension. The more I played, the more my fingers would curl away from the oboe and the more effort I’d have to make to straighten them.”