Category: people

It is a rare composer who lives to see his own centenary, but Elliott Carter seems determined to do so, and at the rate he’s going, he might just write a new piece for the occasion. At 95, Carter is more prolific now than at any time in his long career, and he may well be the last great figure of the long-abandoned modernist movement. “His dogged refusal to bend to the whims of the culture around him makes him a strangely isolated figure in Manhattan. His music is performed much more often in Europe than in America – his only opera, composed in 1998, has never been staged in the US – and he finds himself at odds with the compositional trends that have come and gone in New York.”

“Frank Matcham’s achievements as the most successful and prolific theatre architect in Britain, arguably the world home of theatre, remain unsurpassed. This year is the 150th anniversary of his birth and it is being marked, coincidentally, by the restoration of his two finest surviving buildings.”

“The Kennedy Center voted yesterday to appoint Alma Powell and Kenneth Duberstein, the vice chairmen of its board, to oversee the center’s operations while it continues to search for a new chairman. Powell and Duberstein will take over the duties of James A. Johnson, who announced last April that he would step down this month after seven years as chairman… The 32-year-old federally supported arts center has enjoyed an artistic renaissance in recent years.”

Semyon Bychkov is making his Metropolitan Opera debut this week, 20 years after he seemed like the next hot conductor. What happened? “Bychkov’s career illustrates, among other things, the growing pains that take place in the trajectory from wunderkind to established maestro. At 51, with a mop of curly black hair, he’s still young in conductor years. But for conductors and musicians of his generation, those growing pains were exacerbated by the decline of the recording industry, meaning that big cushy recording contracts with major labels were not renewed. Meanwhile his newness wore off. Always a conductor with a certain amount of brio and showmanship, a crackling energy that gets the audience going, he is sometimes branded heavy-handed.”

Smithsonian head Lawrence Small is expected to plead guilty later this week to a misdemeanor violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Yes birds. Small is a collector of Brazilian tribal art and he was charged after his art collection was found to “contain feathers from several protected species, including the jabiru, roseate spoonbill and crested caracara.”

The director of Sadler’s Wells Theatre is leaving to run Paris’ Chatelet Theatre. Jean-Luc Choplin’s “no-nonsense management style was honed in his years working for the Disney Corporation, and instantly ruffled feathers at the more sedate Sadler’s Wells. There was a string of well-publicised clashes culminating in a threat of legal action by four women managers over allegations of sex discrimination and constructive dismissal.”

It’s been a crappy winter for New York’s intellectual class. “If ever there was a moment of generational split, this winter of our discontent is it. One need only consider the contrast: The struggling freelancers for a now-defunct journal of ideas are handed court papers, while the professional intellectuals, the ones with coveted staff jobs and 401(k)’s, are using prime literary real estate to lament their middle-aged romantic failures. The old guard is unraveling, the new guard is being sued.”

Conductor William Christie has a cult following in his adopted France. But Peter Conrad discovers a dispeptic soul who gives no quarter. “A recent book by a French critic pays reverent homage to what it calls l’église Christique – the Church according to Christie not Christ. I didn’t imagine, when I set off to meet him in Paris, that I was going to encounter a redeemer or saviour. I’d have been grateful, however, for a little milky human kindness.”

James Levine reveals his opening lineup for the Boston Symphony. “He is just past 60 and has more or less run the musical end of the Metropolitan Opera for more than 30 years. His health is both a mystery and a cause for concern. He walks gingerly and conducts sitting down. His musical energy, on the other hand, is as high as ever and his graphic if understated conducting style just as compelling. He talks as if he is planning on a long future.”

Spalding Gray was working on a new piece when he went missing last week. “His family last saw him Jan. 9, when he walked away from his SoHo apartment without his wallet after having seen the movie “Big Fish” with his wife, Kathleen Russo, and one of his sons. There have been subsequent reports that he was seen on the Staten Island ferry later that night, and Russo has said she fears he may have tried to jump off the boat.”