Category: people

John Adams is at the stage of his career that a little self promotion may be in order. Not necessarily for more attention. But his work does need an advocate. “You know that basically I’m a very private person, the outgrowth of my Yankee upbringing. Lately I’ve had to reconcile that attitude with the demand for public works; without blowing my own horn, I like to link myself with Frank Gehry. Large pieces — operas, orchestra works, concert halls — need to preserve the personality of the maker while pleasing the outside world, and it’s not always easy.”

After he was dead (killing himself in 1991 at the age of 40), Seattle poet Jesse Bernstein was considered by many to be the “Godfather of Grunge” “He not only liked the naked elegance of the music, he helped shape it, opening for the bands (Nirvana, Big Black, Soundgarden, U-Men, the Crows) who went on to the big time, and working the crowd into a ecstatic heat. He liked to cause a stir. When in the mood, he added to his legend. When not, he complained about it.”

A private investigator in Australia has told a court about a plan he and a partner had to swindle art critic Robert Hughes out of $30,000. The pair tried to sell Hughes favorable testimony during the critic’s dangerous driving trial three years ago. The pair were arrested in 2000 after a police sting.

“The annual post-prandial lecturette on Booker night has been a thing of controversy in the hands of Lisa Jardine (too populist), Gerald Kaufman (too sinister), Kenneth Baker (too fulsome) or Carmen Callil (too critical of the home product). John Carey, however, is someone you can trust. Among the politicians, publishers, historians and media tarts who judge the Booker, he is a bona fide literary-critical star. He retired four years ago as the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, (the top Eng Lit job in the land) and his weekly reviews are by common consent the ne plus ultra of waspish evaluation.”

Dave Hickey is an unusual icon in the art world, a critic who flatly refuses to embrace either academic jargon, or what he calls the “Art Brit-tabloid sleaze” now in vogue as a way to supposedly reach young people. According to Hickey, art’s problems are just society’s problems writ small. “Art’s just not that important or that fashionable anymore. It’s not cool. Not only that, it’s not intellectually serious… What do you do with an art world in which the normative work of art is a giant C-print of three Germans standing beside a mailbox? What’s that? Stop it, please.”

At 77, Italian playwright/director Dario Fo is still rabble rousing. He’s in Genoa restaging Rossini’s opera, Il Viaggio a Reims: “They discovered I had re-written some of Rossini’s text, a story about Charles X, the King of France immediately after the French revolution. He threw out the Government, called for new elections, limited the number of voters, made laws for his own benefit. Yes! Many understood him to be similar to (the Italian Prime Minister) Berlusconi! So the politicians said we could not do this opera in Genoa. It was a big struggle. In the end, the city council said to the provincial governors, ‘Sorry, the program is set, tickets have been sold, we cannot stop the production’.”

Tenor Luciano Pavarotti says he’ll turn his attentions to teaching when he retires from singing in 2005: “I want to give something back to the younger generation. Teaching I think is the most difficult thing; teaching is more difficult than singing. Why? Because you have to transfer a thought from your brain to the brain of the other person and the throat of the other person. I want to teach people who really are good,”

“Eight grandchildren of Ernest Hemingway have settled a feud with the widow of the writer’s son over his $7m (£4.2m) estate, according to one of the family. The settlement, which includes a portion of the author’s literary rights, follows the death of Gregory Hemingway two years ago. A transsexual, he died of heart disease on the floor of a cell in the women’s annex of a Florida jail.” The sexual identity of the younger Hemingway, who had changed his name to Gloria, was at the heart of the dispute within the family over whether he had the right to any portion of his father’s estate.

This year marks the centenary of both Vladimir Horowitz and Rudolf Serkin, arguably the two finest concert pianists of the last century. They were contemporaries, but their lives and careers could not have been more divergent, whether in the repertoire they chose or the attitude they brought to the keyboard. Serkin was the conservative, striving for singular perfection in a narrow range of repertoire. Horowitz was the maverick, rarely performing a piece the same way twice, and forever seeking out new challenges and new musical voices. History may not yet be able to determine which man had the greater impact on the world of music, but their joint impact will be felt for years to come.

Mere months after the much-publicized firing of Festival of Authors director Greg Gatenby, Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre has abruptly dismissed the man who has programmed its music for nearly two decades. Derek Andrews “was informed on Sept. 25 in a terse letter that his contract would not be renewed in December and that the non-profit corporation no longer needed his services… Andrews obsessively sought out and exposed new and young talent, helped establish Harbourfront as a key element in the international touring network, and provided a refreshing and intelligent alternative to mass-marketed commercial music.”