“The 82-year-old Ozawa, a former [chief] conductor at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Vienna State Opera, had suffered from esophageal cancer, multiple bouts of pneumonia and back problems severe enough to require surgery in the past eight years, but recovered and went back to conducting. Ozawa was diagnosed with aortic valve stenosis and will undergo treatment and rehabilitation for about a month at a Tokyo hospital, his office said.”
Category: people
The End(s) Of Oscar Wilde
John Banville considers the writer’s last years – and whether (and in what ways) he willed his own destruction.
The Unfashionable Mr. Lloyd Webber Writes A Memoir
It is fashionable among theater intellectuals to look down on Lloyd Webber’s musicals: their catchy tunes, their ripe orchestrations, their puzzling stories (“The story of Evita is simple” is perhaps the book’s most controversial claim, starkly undermined by the ensuing plot summary) and of course their commercial success. But by his own admission in “Unmasked,” Lloyd Webber has never been fashionable.
Russ Solomon, Founder Of Tower Records, Dead At 92
“A high school dropout who made his first album sale at 16, dealing used jukebox records out of his father’s California drugstore, Mr. Solomon built a music empire that sprawled across more than a dozen countries and nearly 200 stores.”
Harvey Schmidt, 88, Composer Of ‘The Fantasticks’ And ‘110 In The Shade’
“The Texas-born songwriter met his longtime lyricist Tom Jones when they were both students at the University of Texas/Austin in the late 1940s, and over the course of a career that spanned nearly the next half-century, Mr. Schmidt never wrote with anyone else.” Their most famous show, The Fantasticks, had the longest run of any play in American history: 17,162 performances over nearly 42 years in a small off-Broadway theater.
Barbara Lekberg, Who Wielded A Blowtorch For Her Art, Has Died At 92
Lekberg found her medium when she learned to weld. “‘The old struggle with plaster and coat hangers ended when I began to weld steel,’ she said, referring to her early efforts to make sculpture. ‘Steel held its own when projected into space and seemed to do everything I needed. This is a primal joy in sculpture: that a mineral from the earth can be a vehicle for expressing one’s innermost thoughts.'”
David Ogden Stiers, Major Winchester On MASH, Has Died At 75
But he wasn’t just famous for MASH: “The actor, with his educated, resonant intonations — though he did not share Major Winchester’s Boston Brahmin accent — was much in demand for narration and voiceover work, and for efforts as the narrator and as of Disney’s enormous hit animated film Beauty and the Beast, he shared a Grammy win for best recording for children and another nomination for album of the year.”
Hollywood’s Time’s Up Movement Raises $21 Million In First Few Weeks
Since launching on Jan. 1, they have received $21M from 20,000 donors from all 50 states ranging from $5 to $2M. “That momentum has just continued and grown but so has the need.” Of the 1,700 who requested help, the fund has been able to meet the needs of 1,250 — finding them lawyers (500 attorneys volunteered to help, many doing it pro bono).
Grace Paley On Artists Engaging With Politics
Asked in the same Paris Review interview whether it’s good for a writer to be politically engaged in turbulent times, Paley registered the question’s absurdity, refusing the notion that politics might be a harmful distraction for an artist: “It certainly isn’t antithetical to a passionate interior life – all that noise coming in. You have to make music of it somehow.”
Inside The Horrible Cult Of James Levine
“Interviews with nearly two dozen former students and musicians from Levine’s Cleveland days, including six from the maestro’s inner circle, indicate the conductor’s alleged sexual behavior was part of a sweeping system to control this core group. As Levine yoked his musical gifts and position to a bid for power, he dictated what they read, how they dressed, what they ate, when they slept — even whom they loved.”