Category: people

Conductor Claudio Abbado has resurrected the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. “For musicians and audiences alike, Mr. Abbado’s return was also the stuff of emotion. Last year he stepped down after 13 years as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. But more pertinently, after a diagnosis of stomach cancer in 2000 he is again in good health and, at 70, has proven strong enough to lead a new orchestra. It is something he is practiced at doing.”

“Though considered in certain circles to be America’s greatest living composer, he is, in others, demonized for alienating audiences with music that’s so dense, so packed with information in so little time, that it’s like street noise. Anyone listening to Carter expecting typical classical symmetry and tunefulness is primed for disappointment. If heard in the anything-can-happen spirit of progressive jazz, Carter’s hairpin turns and animated chatter among instruments are anything but mysterious. He tests listeners at the beginning of his pieces, often with a jarring chord that all but says, ‘If you can handle this, the rest is easy’.”

As president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers has a radical agenda – transforming the very nature of the way one of the world’s great universities does business. “Even if Summers were a guileful and calculating figure with a hidden agenda of drastic change, he would have a tough row to hoe. But he’s not: he’s a blunt and overbearing figure with an overt agenda of drastic change. It should come as no surprise that Larry Summers is not quite as popular a figure as his gracious predecessor was.”

John Coplans, a founder and former editor of Artforum magazine, who was also a painter, critic, curator, museum director and “finally a photographer of discomfiting images of his own aging body,” has died at the age of 83.

“America seems to be rather ghoulishly prolonging, and even luxuriating in, the grief attendant upon the recent spate of top-table Hollywood demises. This is a measure of the affection that these old warhorses inspired in many people. But I wonder if this enduring nostalgia doesn’t also arise from a widespread wish not to have to gaze upon the present, on the haemorrhaging economy and rising unemployment, on what’s been so disastrously wrought in the Middle East through lies and manipulation, or the ghastly triumphs of NeoCon-corporate feudalism.”

A fan campaign to nominate Harry Potter author JK Rowling for a Nobel has fizzled. “Not a single person sent a letter to the Nobel Committee suggesting her for the 2004 literature award despite an internet crusade asking them to do so.”

Theatre producer and photographer David Jiranek died this weekend at the age of 45. Three years ago Jiranek “traveled to Rwanda to bring disposable instamatic cameras to the children in an orphanage founded and still run by a 90-year-old American matriarch, Rosamond Carr, to care for the young survivors of the Hutu-Tutsi genocide. An exhibition of the astonishing images created by the children became the basis for a photography exhibition shown in Rwanda’s capital city and at various galleries in the United States, most recently this summer in New York.”

After 32 years onstage, pianist Alicia de Larrocha is beginning her long goodbye from performing. “Time has not left her unscathed. At Lincoln Center she looked frail, even tentative, when she made her way centre-stage. She seemed instantly rejuvenated, however, when she touched the keyboard. Larrocha never was a dazzling technician and certainly cannot be one now. It hardly matters.”

It’s been a year since Jonathan Kent left the Almeida Theatre, after a 12 year run leading the place. “The Almeida has become his international calling card. “It’s astonishing, he says – Kent’s favourite word is ‘astonishing’, closely followed by “extraordinary”, both adding to the animated panache of his conversation – ‘I’ve only discovered, on leaving it, that the Almeida is as well known abroad as the RSC or the National. ‘I don’t miss it. I can’t imagine a more golden period and it was absolutely the making of me, but you have to move on. I felt I’d done everything I wanted to do there.”

Tracey Emin is suing critic Hensher. “The feud began in the Independent when Hensher wrote a damning critique of Emin, claiming she was too stupid to be a good conceptual artist. ‘Is it possible to be a good conceptual artist and also very stupid?’ he asked. He doubted it. Emin, he wrote, was a half-witted dullard with no inquiring intelligence. She was, he added, too thick to explore the few interesting concepts she had hit on by chance, and concluded: ‘There’s no hope for Tracey Emin. She’s just no good’.”