Category: people

A new documentary by filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn is being called “a fierce yet tender reckoning with [architect] Louis Kahn’s complicated legacy. The film explores not just the gift and gravitas of the man’s global span of buildings, but also his mystery as a father.” The younger Kahn’s film is a direct and unapologetic effort to reconcile his father’s global reputation as a designer who gave his all to the world with the private scandal of a man who kept three different families in various corners of the world. It could have been a fruitless effort, but then, the younger Kahn met a Bangladesh architect who managed to put it all in perspective…

Architect Zaha Hadid, who won this year’s Pritzker Prize, lives in London. “But while her small collection of completed works has catapulted her to recognition in America and on the Continent, she has not a single building to her name in Britain, where she has lived for 30 years. Although her designs won a competition for the Welsh opera house, local politics, which found her strangely angled planes too much to stomach, saw them off. Since then she has repeatedly entered British competitions such as one for a multi-million pound BBC music centre in west London, without luck.”

Mel Gibson’s power in Hollywood has soared with the success of “The Passion of the Christ.” “Given the money Gibson stands to make from ‘The Passion’ and the media attention it generated, I’d be shocked if he wasn’t No. 1. In this minute, Gibson is the 800-pound gorilla on the Hollywood landscape. The real question, since there’s no possibility of a sequel, is just what’s down the road. That question is also on the mind of an industry reeling from the magnitude of Gibson’s unexpected success. In a town where money talks and jockeying for position on the power lists is an obsessive annual ritual, the director’s currency is higher than ever, Hollywood executives say.”

Pianist and conductor Michel Pletnev is “a prime example of one who protects under layers of mystery the emotions and the brilliant, albeit sometimes provocative and idiosyncratic sparks of imagination that fire his piano playing.”

That’s the claim of a Scottish author who has researched the matter. “Elvis Presley’s roots can be traced back to a village in Aberdeenshire,” he says.

Michael Tilson Thomas has made a career of doing the music he believes in. “I very much like the idea of the past, present and future being connected. Because I knew so many composers, hearing them sing their own music in their own voices had a huge influence on me. You learn so much about a person from hearing them sing. So I had to work backward with composers I never met, ones who died 200 years before I was born, to create a voice, a clear expressive point of view.”

James Lipton is the popular host of “Inside the Actors Studio.” “He’s a figure both revered and mocked for his highly researched, forelock-tugging, truth-inducing encounters with some of the most famous members of the acting profession. In real life, Lipton is an intriguing contrast to his TV persona. To begin with, he’s shorter than his imposing air might lead you to believe. (He’s always sitting down on the program.) But he’s also surprisingly shy, self-effacing and the possessor of a little-boy-lost charm that’s at odds with his actual age of 77.”

Michael Tilson Thomas has been music director of the San Francisco Symphony for ten years. “The conductor was a man with a mission from the beginning, and he is still focused on bringing forward new music, American music, and neglected repertory as well as refreshing the standard classics. But his explorations have taken on a special urgency in recent years.”

“At 75, mezzo Christa Ludwig has lost nothing of her sharpness. There is little of the diva in her manner. She has presence, of course. You can’t have a career that dominated opera on both sides of the Atlantic for 40 years without that. But, immaculately dressed in a dark-grey trouser suit, the effect is discreet. She once wrote that while she always wanted to be a prima donna, she was “too lazy” for the scandal and circus that went with the role.”

Russian ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, who was fired from the Bolshoi Theater (for supposedly being too big)and then rehired by court order, was barred from leaving the country for a performance Monday. Officials took her passport, and later said she was prohibted from leaving because of claims by construction companies that she owed them $76,000 for renovations on her apartment. She has disputed the claims.