Category: people

In 1952, the US banned novelist Graham Greene from entering the United States, citing his youthful membership in the Communist party. Greene was a critic of US foreign policy. Documents reveal though that US officials thought the ban made the US look bad. “They conceded that he had been a member of the British Communist party for only four weeks when a 19-year-old student, ‘as a joke’. They admitted his writing clearly showed that he was anti-communist, according to the documents obtained by the Guardian under the US Freedom of Information Act.”

Composer Ned Rorem is turning 80 – and his “bleak pessimism about the future of music and the world at large has deepened even more. Yet the number and scale of events this season show that his fears of being forgotten are ill-founded. Indeed, Rorem’s milestone year is being marked in grand style.”

When Simon Rattle, the most heralded young conductor of the last several decades, signed on to head the Berlin Philharmonic, widely considered to be the best orchestra in the world, it seemed like a failure-proof partnership. Rattle could shake up the stodgy Berlin establishment, while at the same time gaining the support of the musicians with his undeniable talent with the baton. But more than a year into the Rattle era, Stephen Everson isn’t seeing much to back up all the hype. At this year’s Proms, “it was very striking how little attention the players seemed to pay to their director, and how little his gestures seemed to demand of them.”

Peter Oundjian has been appointed music director of the Toronto Symphony. But first he’s got a couple of seasons to play out leading the Colorado Symphony. “That’s on top of guest-conducting engagements this summer with such premier orchestras as the Boston Symphony and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and his two ongoing posts of artistic director of the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York and music director of the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam.” Just eight years ago, Oundjian wasn’t a conductor, but a violinist with the Tokyo String Quartet.

Sculptor Paul Granlund, whose works were commissioned by collectors and colleges around the world, has died at the age of 77. “Granlund is known for his exuberant human figures, especially dancing lovers and families lifting children into the air. Though primarily a figurative artist, he was equally adept doing geometric and Cubist shapes and even Pop subjects including… huge bronze alphabet letters and a star-burst.”

Director Jonathan Miller has turned sculptor. He spends time in junkyards finding pieces of scrap to weld together. “When I get called an intellectual or a renaissance man or a polymath I think about how my parents would have been embarrassed to be called such vulgar things. they were middle-class, cultivated people – my mother was a very good novelist – to whom knowing about books and art and speaking languages was normal, as well as taking an interest in science and philosophy. They were just educated people who had a lot of interests. It’s normal. And so it is for me. I’m just normally sophisticated, like my dear old dad and my long-dead mother, but I’m increasingly ashamed of the vulgarity around me.”

Theatre producer Andrew Lloyd-Webber says he’ll leave his art collection to the British people when he dies. “Lord Lloyd-Webber’s collection is described as one of the finest in private hands and includes works by Picasso, Canaletto and Rossetti.”

Now that philanthropist Alberto Vilar is broke and unable to meet his pledge commitments to opera companies such as the Metropolitan, a surprising degree of anger towards him has surfaced. “Vilar thinks that the Met simply does not understand the American model of philanthropy, in which giving marches in step with the ups and downs of the financial markets. In strong markets, the wealthy give more; the quid pro quo is that when markets are weak, donors must be allowed to reschedule pledged payments until the markets rebound.”

“Like most unpublished plays, the manuscript version of Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz has the unmistakable stamp of the personal home computer: typographical errors, the playwright’s home address and telephone number, and a hurriedly scrawled ‘latest version’ annotation on its front cover. That normally gets lesser-known regional playwrights a spot on the dusty shelf of some literary manager in a struggling regional theater. It got Cruz a Pulitzer Prize.”

“I love it when people talk about my music and I hate it when they don’t, but I never know quite what they’re talking about. When people analyze my music in a formal way – not by what it means in a Wallace Stevens-ish way but by what it is made of in a technical way – I say to myself, ‘Oh gee, did I do that? I guess I did’.”