Category: people

The world-renowned soprano, 73, said she had stopped performing a year ago but had not revealed her decision until now. Te Kanawa told the BBC it had taken her five years “to say the goodbye in my own mind” but wanted to decide “when it was going to be the last note”.

Lewis, who sang for a decade with the Metropolitan Opera and for two decades with the New York City Opera, was known for interpreting the music of living American composers. She originated two signal roles in contemporary opera: the alcoholic Birdie Hubbard in “Regina,” Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s drama “The Little Foxes,” and the title role in “Lizzie Borden,” by Jack Beeson.

Alberto Guerrero, the Chilean-Canadian who was Glenn’s second and last piano teacher (the first was his mother) said “The secret to teaching Glenn is to let him discover things on his own.” He felt that if Glenn claimed not to have learned anything from Guerrero, “I’d take that as a compliment.”

“The thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor. … Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion. It’s the sense of knowing what’s important.” (He then edges into some rather iffy jokes.)

“Vincent played Tony Soprano’s archenemy Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos, one of his many wiseguy roles. He was Billy Batts in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas – the ‘made man’ who famously told Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito to ‘Go home and get your f*ckin’ shinebox’ – and Frank Marino in the director’s Casino. His performance with Pesci in 1976’s The Death Collector caught the attention of Robert De Niro and Scorsese, and the director offered Vincent a supporting role in Raging Bull.”

Deborah Solomon goes to visit the artist in California: “Hockney is still a dapper, vigorous presence. His conversation is wide-ranging and larded with literary references, and his manner is so genial and confiding that at first you do not notice how stubborn he can be. He delights in espousing contrary opinions, some of which come at you with the force of aesthetic revelation, while others seem perverse and largely indefensible.”

Last week, Noah Charney wrote about how the great painter became a violent, impulsive train wreck. This week, he tells us how much worse Caravaggio got – for instance, he fled to Malta for sanctuary and the Knights welcomed him; the next year, they called him a “putrid and fetid member” of the order and threw him in jail – and how the fact that he was constantly fleeing the authorities affected the way he painted.

“Directors can’t simply let a play speak on its own, but they must put their ear to the ground. Meaning for Hall always returned to an intimate confrontation with the line. He didn’t believe that Shakespeare could be properly done without respecting the forms in which he wrote his plays. Verse, diction, rhetorical patterns — attention to these matters is what allowed a play to live again.”