Category: people

“Julius Baker, the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic for 18 years and the most prominent American flutist of his generation, died on Wednesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 87 and lived in Brewster, N.Y. As an orchestral player, he was principal flutist in several of the best orchestras in the United States. As a performer and a teacher, he was an institution among flutists…”

A German TV poll to name the “best German of all time” “got off to a shaky start yesterday after the Austrian ambassador to Germany complained that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose name appears on a list of eligible candidates, is Austrian.”

“Over the course of a 40-year professional career he has been a musician, composer, conductor, educator and nationally renowned arts administrator. But now the founding director of the Baltimore School for the Arts, who retired in 1996 after leading the school through its first 16 years of existence, is debuting in an entirely new role: David Simon, American realist painter.”

Robert McFerrin (father of singer Bobby McFerrin) is 82. “In 1955, McFerrin became the first black man to be signed to New York’s Metropolitan Opera. He also performed the songs for a lip-synching Sidney Poitier in the 1959 MGM classic ‘Porgy and Bess’. He was honored June 18 in St. Louis with a lifetime achievement award from Opera America.”

Andy Warhol would have been 75 this week. “He might be taken aback by his status as a household name, and by the fact that his personal museum has become a cultural cornerstone of his hometown. Or maybe he’d be taken aback just for a little while and then revel in his fame, given his fascination with the concept…”

Conductor Neeme Jarvi, who “turned 66 in June, left Estonia in 1980, but retains enormous patriotic affection for it. Jarvi’s word is magic in his home country, where he played a key role in inspiring the construction of the new Parnu concert hall and a new opera house and concert hall scheduled to open in 2008 in Tallinn, the capital and Jarvi’s hometown. He is an active participant in Estonian musical life, returning annually to conduct and teach at the academy that bears his name.”

This year’s Kennedy Center Honors are announced. Violinist Itzhak Perman is joined by fellow musician James Brown, comedienne Carol Burnett, country icon Loretta Lynn, film and theater director Mike Nichols. “The Honors is an annual ritual, now 26 years old, where illustrious stars and powerful politicians salute five ground-breakers in the performing arts for a lifetime of distinguished work.”

Andy Warhol wasn’t an artist, writes Terry Teachout. He was “a preternaturally shrewd operator who transformed Marcel Duchamp’s anti-art into glossy gewgaws suitable for mail-order merchandising. He silk-screened money. Why should those who do care about art bother to take note of the 75th birthday of an anti-artist whose works were purposefully forgettable? Because Warhol did as much as anyone to shape the culture of pure, accomplishment-free celebrity in which we now live. He envisioned it far more clearly than most of his contemporaries, and this clarity helped make him the best-known artist of the postwar era.”

Anne Little Poulet has been named the new director of the Frick Museum. “Although she has never run a museum, Ms. Poulet, 61, comes to the job with 30 years’ experience in the art world. For two decades she ran the department of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. During that time she was responsible for a number of acquisitions.”

Conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim has once again placed himself in the center of Mideast politics, playing a recital in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and criticizing the Israeli government’s policies towards the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. “Barenboim, 60, an Argentine-born Jew who grew up in Israel, has long campaigned for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, and has extolled music’s power to break down barriers. Since the early 1990s, he and Palestinian academic Edward Said have run a summer workshop for young musicians from Israel and Arab countries in places like Germany, the United States and Spain.”