Category: people

Carnegie Hall’s Robert Harth was the right director at the right time. He “fostered collegiality, demystified the director’s post and continued with the Carnegie Hall mission: to present the great artists and ensembles of the world, both fledglings and masters; to devise educational offerings; to bring music students to the institution for training workshops; and especially to commission and perform new works. His attitude toward contemporary music was refreshingly free of agenda. Living composers were not some special cause or somber obligation. Rather, it was only natural for anyone interested in the great heritage of classical music to be curious about what’s going on today.”

Why do big stars promote products? Because they can make big money. But “like Bill Murray’s character in the film, most A-listers will do ads for these types of products only in non English-speaking countries. Why? Because they’re paranoid about tarnishing their images back at home in Hollywood. In the age of staras- luxury-brand, no celebrity worth their Golden Globe nomination wants to be associated with pedestrian consumer items. Or to look like a money-grabbing sell-out.”

“Robert Harth arrived at Carnegie Hall in September 2001 with a mandate to stabilize an institution bruised by the acrimonious tenure of his predecessor, Franz Xaver Ohnesorg. He quickly projected a combination of businesslike efficiency and musical adventure, adroitly navigating a series of potentially catastrophic shoals.”

Mauricio Kagel is not your ordinary composer. To begin with, he’s never been all that enamored of classical music’s grand traditions and more-than-occasional pomposities. And yet, as a dedicated modernist, he belongs to a school of composition which tends to be populated with the genre’s most humorless specimens. So how does Kagel deal with being a part of an industry he frequently finds to be far too enamored of its own genius? By using his much-respected musical talents to poke fun, of course. Kagel invented the concept of “instrumental theater” back in the 1960s, and has used it to great effect: in one of his works, the conductor of a small chamber ensemble is instructed to fake a heart attack and “die” on stage.

Nearly every musician knows Paul Robeson’s story – the son of a former slave, educated at the best schools America had to offer, grew up to become one of the most admired singers in the world, until he began to speak out on behalf of civil rights for African-Americans, at which point he was very nearly run out of the business. The U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp honoring Robeson’s contributions to American culture and society in February, possibly the first time that a branch of the U.S. government has cast him in a positive light.

“New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who was reportedly short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature last year and drew on her experiences in mental hospitals for her fiction, has died aged 79. Frame, who had leukemia, was regarded internationally as New Zealand’s finest writer since Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923. A recluse for much of her life, she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic when young and spent eight years in mental hospitals, where she was reportedly given shock treatment 200 times. She was saved from a scheduled lobotomy in 1951 when a hospital superintendent learned that her first book, The Lagoon And Other Stories, had won New Zealand’s leading award for fiction.”

Monologuist Spalding Gray, who disappeared January 12 from his New York home, had attempted suicide several times in the last year, and had been taking multiple combinations of antidepressant medication for more than two years, in order to deal with the spiralling emotional fallout which began when the author was involved in a near-fatal car accident in Ireland in 2001. Gray, who had battled hereditary depression and bipolar disorder throughout his career, was also escorted off the Staten Island Ferry a few days before his disappearance by security personnel who were afraid that he was preparing to throw himself off the boat.

“He was not the first host of The Tonight Show (Steve Allen), nor the longest running (Johnny Carson) or the edgiest comic (Jay Leno). But Jack Paar, who died at his Greenwich, Conn., home on Tuesday at 85, brought to his tenure at the helm of the NBC staple a uniquely urbane wit as well as a flamboyant and intelligent cultural breadth. He essentially invented the late-night talk show format, and he set a standard for the art of television conversation.”

If there has been a kingmaker in the pop music industry in recent years, Antonio Reid has been it. “In nearly four years as the chief executive of Arista, Mr. Reid, known as L.A., sparked the careers of Avril Lavigne, Pink and Dido. This year alone he brought in 31 Grammy nominations, more than any other label.” But a couple of weeks ago, Reid found himself out of a job, the victim of an increasingly cost-conscious industry for which prestige is no longer enough if it doesn’t translate into profit. The bizarre truth is that, in the last two years under Reid’s watch, Arista lost $200 million.

“Nikolaj Znaider, still only in his late twenties, is already being spoken of in the same breath as some of the great violinists of the past – Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin. The point is not so much that he sounds like any of them but that he is in that illustrious line of musicians who are able to use technique with wisdom and sensibility to exert a strong personality in their playing.” Znaider has very little use for the type of career-obsessed musicians he encountered at Juilliard, and believes that many in the classical industry have completely lost sight of what’s important in their playing. So naturally, critics love the guy.