Category: people

“He was revered for the precision of his baton technique, and for his prodigious memory — he rarely used a score in performances — but when he was at his most interpretively idiosyncratic, he used his powers to distend phrases and reconfigure familiar balances in the service of an unusual inner vision.”

“Competing in Sochi for Thailand as Vanessa Vanakorn, using the surname of her Thai father, she finished a distant last among the 67 racers who completed the two runs in the Olympic giant slalom.”

The keyboardist/composer made the revelation on his website, announcing that he would be unable to attend the Sapporo International Art Festival, of which he is the guest director.

“As part of WNYC’s 90th anniversary celebration, Marty Goldensohn, former WNYC news director, shares excerpts from the station’s 1998 series Reports on the Afterlife. It’s based on Vonnegut’s book God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, a fictionalized account of interviews with recently deceased people.”

As the flutist/saxophonist once told an interviewer, “New Age music does something wonderful to the nervous system. It settles you down into a deep state of relaxation. When people want to ‘cool out,’ a [New Age] record will do it real quick. It’s meditative music.”

While he did write serious stage works based on Dostoevsky and de Maupassant, “he was still more widely known for lighter one-act works whose accessibility, tunefulness and economy of scale made them among the most frequently performed operas in the world … perennial favorites of college, semiprofessional and regional companies.”

“The recent Wagner anniversary has brought a predictable amount of equivocation and hand-wringing about the German master’s role in the history of hate. We know by now not to read history backward. A nineteenth-century composer who died in 1883 cannot logically be accused of personal complicity in a twentieth-century genocide. Yet that does not mean that the broader question of his responsibility for the spread of modern anti-Semitism can be simply ignored.”

There are a few things I have witnessed becoming obsolete in the past few years, the first being autographs. I haven’t been asked for an autograph since the invention of the iPhone with a front-facing camera. The only memento “kids these days” want is a selfie. It’s part of the new currency, which seems to be “how many followers you have on Instagram.”

Philip Hoare asks, “Can we excuse these flighty young men their fling with the far right?”

J. Jerome has to deal with a shortage of instruments, an even greater shortage of tuners (he’s the only one in town), a near-total lack of spare parts – and, as a member of Pakistan’s small Christian minority, the threat of extreme Islamist militants who disapprove of music in general and Western music in particular. Yet he struggles on. (includes audio)