Category: people

The one-time Grove’s editor was a champion of the music of Monteverdi. “Stevens felt a mission to demonstrate the validity and accessibility of musicology as a discipline, often deploying what one former colleague called a ‘wry and penetrating sense of humour’. He gave it full rein in an essay on the performance of the Monteverdi Vespers, complaining of ‘the cabalistic obscurantism that now surrounds it, fostered by misinformed musicians and pseudo-musicologists’. He had absolutely no time for a misguided veneration of the past.”

Margaret Atwood ponders the worlds of arts and science: “A lot of people are funny: they think there’s more money in science than in art, and they are right. It’s absolutely true. The catch is that what drives us is not our rational brain but our whole human arsenal of emotions and thought. And our only way of understanding that is through the arts.”

Gito Baloi, 39, one of southern Africa’s most celebrated musicians, was shot and killed in central Johannesburg in an apparent robbery. Baloi was a bass guitarist and one-time member of the jazz group Tananas.”

Leon Fleisher is back playing the piano two hands. And how did he cure his famous hand malady? “His worldwide search for a cure ended in the mid-1990s when an injection of Botox, of all things, relaxed his fingers, allowing him to play two-handed piano for the first time in decades. (Botox, a toxin that causes botulism, is better known for its cosmetic use as a muscle relaxant that smoothes the wrinkles of aging celebrities, among others.) Now in the middle of a worldwide tour, Fleisher has just signed with Vanguard Classics to record his first two-handed album in 40 years.”

“I’ve been a very close friend to people like Luciano Berio, John Cage, Pierre Boulez. This is what is great about art: there are no frontiers. You are friends among writers, and you steal from writers, the next day you steal from musicians, the next day you steal from a sculptor or a painter. It is always like that. It’s a continuous robbery one from the other. But it’s a robbery without a mask.”

“Few artists attain the same respect in their lifetime as is given to the 81-year-old Lucien Freud. Respect not just from fellow artists or lovers of contemporary art, but from museums around the world who treat this violent, deliberately ugly and ungainly portrayer of the naked human body as a titan, securely established in the great tradition of Chardin, Manet and Degas, rather than a contemporary whose reputation has yet to be tried by time.”

Writer Ian McEwan – winner of the prestigious Booker Prize and author of the best-selling “Atonement” – was refused entry into the US and delayed for 24 hours at the start of a speaking tour of the US Tuesday. One of Britain’s most popular and acclaimed authors, McEwan “almost missed his appearance before Seattle Arts & Lectures after he was refused entry to the United States by American authorities at the Vancouver, B.C., airport and spent more than 24 hours in enforced limbo.”

Alistair Cooke much preferred radio to television “because the pictures were better,” he often said, quoting the remark of 7-year-old boy that he’d heard of. “You are in charge of the picture,” Cooke elaborated. “If you stand up against the Empire State Building on television and tell its history, which is ghoulish and funny, viewers are saying, ‘He looks a little tired,’ or, ‘He’s not as thin as he used to be.’ Whereas if you tell the story on radio, your words create the picture, and that’s what I love. The voice does the whole thing.”

“Alistair Cooke’s suave and debonair on-camera persona was not the whole story. He was not English, but American, giving up his British passport in 1941, as bombs rained down during the Blitz. For this act, some in the BBC never forgave him. He loved America passionately, and saw it as an open and optimistic alternative to the grim class-bound world he had left.”

When Glenn Lowry took over the reins at New York’s Museum of Modern Art nearly a decade ago, news of his appointment didn’t exactly set the art world on fire. But in his years at the helm of one of America’s most visible museums, Lowry has made himself indispensible, and is now credited with having made possible the Modern’s upcoming move to a huge new “campus” in midtown Manhattan. “Currently put at $858 million (including financing for endowment), the makeover is certainly one of the most expensive in museum history. And to date, the capital campaign is less than $200 million short of its goal.” And to hear MOMA supporters tell it, credit for that funding success goes directly to Glenn Lowry.