Category: people

Soprano Susan Chilcott, considered one of Britain’s brightest young opera stars, has died of breat cancer at age 40. “Among the first to pay tribute to the singer, who died at her home in Timsbury, near Bath, was the Royal Opera House’s music director, Antonio Pappano. ‘We are all devastated… She was surely one of the shining stars on the international opera scene’.”

For two decades, Irene Dalis has been at the helm of the opera company she helped to found in her hometown of San Jose. Opera San Jose is a major success story in a tough field, and Dalis gets much of the credit for keeping the company vibrant through good times and bad. “We don’t pretend to be something that we’re not. We’re certainly not going to be a San Francisco Opera. Their budget is around $60 million. Ours is under $3 million. But we have other values. Our company is the only one of its kind in America and it’s not because I’m such a genius. I’m copying the format used in Germany where each city of 100,000 or more has its own opera company and they hire singers by the year.”

Michael Stafford has been named the new head of the Milwaukee Public Museum. Stafford has been the chief of a Michigan science museum, where he oversaw a $31 million renovation project. The hope in Milwaukee is that Stafford will be able to raise the museum’s local profile, and by extension, improve its fundraising abilities. The museum’s last president, Roger Bowen, resigned after only 15 months on the job.

Abstract painter Sir Terry Frost has died of cancer. “Sir Terry was at the forefront of abstract art in Britain and was renowned for his use of vibrant colours, dolloping blobs of colour and spiralling squiggles on to his canvasses.”

Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks on how to write a play: “I feel that you can plan a play out in great detail, or have it just strike you over the head when you walk down the street. Either way, it’s ultimately an act of grace.”

Anna Somers Cocks, founding editor of The Art Newspaper, is leaving the publication after 13 years. “Over the years I have learnt how much the art world is interconnected: how, for example, an academic publication in one country can lead to an exhibition in another that then boosts the market for a certain category of art.”

Twenty-one-year-old pianist Lang Lang is the brightest of young stars. “Lang Lang’s story, like that of many athletic and artistic prodigies, is emblematic of an entire generation of Chinese parents and their only children, and their high expectations and extreme sacrifices for those children.”

John Shearman, an art historian and scholar who consulted with the Vatican on the restoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, has died at the age of 72. “Dr. Shearman probably achieved the most fame for his discovery that the vault of the Sistine Chapel was cracked along its length in 1504, four years before Michelangelo began work on it. Because the old decoration — incorporating stars and some geometrical shapes — was ruined, a new ceiling was needed.”

“Vendela Vida is a part of a coterie of writers — Heidi Julavits, Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon, to name a few — who are young, gifted and both blessed and cursed. While they are admired for their work and for leading a renaissance of literature, publishing and philanthropy in San Francisco, they are also major snark targets, annoying others for seeming to have so much brilliance, youth and charm.” She’s also married to Eggers, and the two of them may be the closest thing the American literary scene has to a power couple. Still, Vida seems a bit nonplussed by the whole fame thing, and seems genuinely to wish that the world would just pipe down and let her write.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has been around since the days of John Adams, who founded it, and traditions run deep within its membership, which is elected from within and includes an array of intellectual and moneyed elites. So it’s not a big surprise that Leslie Berlowitz, who was brought in to shake up the academy in the late 1990s, has made a lot of enemies since she took over. “Berlowitz’s supporters say she is an agent of change who has breathed new life into what was once a moribund clique of inbred Cambridge academics. Her detractors say she is a manipulative, imperious power grabber who has needlessly alienated academy fellows and staff alike.”