Category: people

Pianist Lang Lang is only 21 years old, and this summer, he is everywhere in the world of classical music. Recordings, TV specials, and a seemingly endless series of performances have turned the young Chinese-born phenom into the Next Big Thing in the industry. But David Patrick Stearns warns that if there’s one thing classical music buffs hate, it’s the notion that an artist is being forced on them. Lang is as good as the hype, says Stearns, but he needs to start watching out for the inevitable backlash.

A new book reports that Stalin was so enraged by the anti-communism of movie actor John Wayne, he tried to have him killed. “John Wayne – The Man Behind the Myth, by British writer and actor Michael Munn, says there were several attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to kill the man known to audiences around the world as Duke.”

Frank Rizzo remembers two theatre critics. “The theater world this month lost two distinguished critics who enlightened their readers as well as decades of theater artists. Boston’s Elliot Norton, dean of American drama critics, died July 20 at the age of 100. Closer to home, Markland Taylor, who wrote for the New Haven Register and Variety, died in his home in Southbury on July 6. He was 67. Both were great influences, especially to this theater lover.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov is coming to TV – as Sarah Jessica Parker’s love interest in “Sex in the City.” “I seem to have a tendency to do things that people think I shouldn’t do. I think it’s about time to do something my children can’t watch.”

Kennedy Center chief Michael Kaiser has been appointed asa “cultural ambassador by the US State Department. “Kaiser said he has a different agenda from the artists’. ‘Funding patterns are shifting. In some countries 70 to 80 percent of an organization’s budget was being provided by the government. Government funding is being reduced or not growing. This is a time in history where the arts around the world are in transition’.”

“Harold C. Schonberg, the ubiquitous and authoritative chief music critic of The New York Times from 1960 to 1980, whose reviews and essays influenced and chronicled vast changes in the world of opera and classical music, died yesterday… He was 87 and lived in Manhattan. Writing daily reviews and more contemplative Sunday pieces, Mr. Schonberg set the standard for critical evaluation and journalistic thoroughness. He wrote his reviews in a crisp, often staccato style that gave his evaluations unequivocal clarity and directness, attributes that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1971, the first for a music critic.”

“Elliott Carter is a phenomenon. Now halfway through his 96th year, he is as productive a composer as he ever was – maybe even more so… There are no compromises with Carter. His music is tough to get to grips with in terms of all its complexities, wrought of conflicts, contrasts, contradictions and intricate rhythmic conundrums. Not that audience appreciation seems to be a top priority, or even a particular concern.”

“John Schlesinger was once quoted as saying, ‘What interests me is not the hero but the coward… not the success, but the failure.’ That sense of empathy and melancholy pervaded the director’s best films, which will be remembered as compelling portraits, not just of their particular times and places, but of characters at their most vulnerable and damaged.” Schlesinger died last week after being removed from life-support machines.

Ezra Pound was off his rocker, of course. It’s part of what made him such a great poet. That unhinged quality is also what makes his forays into the world of music simultaneously unsettling and fascinating, says Richard Taruskin. “He loved playing the fool, describing his aesthetic theories, the authentic fruit of his genius, in a semiliterate patois familiar to anyone who has read his letters or scanned the titles of his essays. And those theories drove him to compose music despite a confessed inability — vouched for by his fellow poets William Carlos Williams and W. B. Yeats, among others — to carry a tune.”

For 42 years, Irina Antonova has been at the forefront of the Russian art scene. The director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has fought battles with the old Soviet Politburo, and with today’s opportunistic Russian politicians. “Antonova, 81, has combined elite connections, political smarts, love of art, courage and boundless energy to protect and promote [the Pushkin’s] collection… But now, this and other Russian museums are reaching out to the world, and the most extensive Pushkin exhibit ever to tour the United States — a selection of 75 French masterpieces — opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.”