Category: people

“Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated composer Michael Kamen has died at his London home at the age of 55. He collapsed after an apparent heart attack, according to his Los Angeles-based agent Jeff Sanderson.” Kamen was classically trained, but known chiefly for his crossover work, including a much-ballyhooed joint concert of the San Francisco Symphony and the rock band Metallica. He also collaborated on Pink Floyd’s classic 1979 album, The Wall.

Jim Hall, writes Terry Teachout, is our greatest living jazz guitarist. But he’s not exactly a household name. “To be sure, Mr. Hall, who turns 73 next month, is nobody’s idea of a natural celebrity. Bald, bespectacled and soft-spoken to a fault, he looks less hip than shyly professorial. His intensely intimate music gets under your skin rather than grabbing you by the lapels. Given sufficient time, though, such artists have a way of evening the odds. Today, the National Endowment for the Arts names Mr. Hall an NEA Jazz Master, an honor accompanied by a check for $25,000.”

“When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980, some 50,000 people turned out for the funeral of France’s most famous modern philosopher. Six years later his lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, joined him here in Montparnasse. The stream of people coming to pay tribute has never really dried up. Growing interest in Sartre is by no means an exclusively French phenomenon. Strangely enough, his philosophical writings may now be receiving more scrutiny in the United States than in his native country.”

Star playwright Patrick Marber can “currently do no wrong. Ten years since he was a stand-up comic, then Steve Coogan’s sidekick, Marber now has three hit plays to his name, Hollywood beating at his door and After Miss Julie, his update of Strindberg’s classic, about to open at the Donmar. Plus another play ‘on the go’. Most people who know Marber would still expect him to find something to moan about. He’s the kind of bloke, for instance, likely to offer a masterclass in misery about turning 40 next year. But no, he says, he feels ‘quite comfortable’ about it.”

Everin Quintero, a renowned Colombian artist born without arms or legs who studied in the US and has traveled there every year since her student days seven years ago, has been denied a visa for this year’s trip…

“Having once scrubbed floors at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, the home of the celebrated Kirov Opera, Anna Netrebko (pronounced nuh-TREB-koh), 32, is now the company’s biggest young star. Her luminous lyric soprano voice, impeccable technique and heartfelt acting have won raves from San Francisco to Vienna. Since the recent release of her debut solo recording of opera arias, she has been featured in classical music publications and fashionably photographed for glamour magazines.”

“Two men who tried to extort $30,000 from expatriate art critic Robert Hughes in return for favourable evidence at his dangerous-driving trial have been jailed for two years.”

The National Medals of Arts, the U.S. government’s highest honor for artists, is leaning heavily towards the music industry this year, with conductor Leonard Slatkin, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, country star George Strait, and bluesman Buddy Guy being selected to receive the award. Among other NMA recipients are director Ron Howard, and PBS’s live music showcase, Austin City Limits.

Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, best known for writing the film score for Zorba the Greek, is being taken to task by politicians and activists in Greece and Israel after saying at a public ceremony that Jews “are the root of evil.”

Merz was a leading member of the Italian Arte Povera movement. “Merz and his colleagues, who included his wife Marisa, used ordinary, ‘poor’ materials, both natural and manufactured, to create the most poetic, extraordinary effects. Their work gained international prominence in the late 1960s