Category: people

“Ms. Alain’s interpretations of Bach, François Couperin and Dieterich Buxtehude, precise yet engaging and colorful, were widely considered authoritative.”

“The book, a plainly written, deadpan chronicle of an ordinary life, seemed to push the allowable boundaries of ordinary, entering an edge-of-space world where critics quarrel over literary metaphysics. Reading ‘Misadventures,’ they were divided over whether they saw a bad joke or a kind of outsider-art masterpiece.”

“The handsome, square-jawed actor, who was often said to resemble Clark Gable, … appeared in more than 60 movies … In the 1950s, Robertson moved into television” – most famously as stagecoach troubleshooter Jim Hardie in Tales of Wells Fargo – “where the faster pace appeared to suit his no-nonsense style.”

“[He] covered theater in London and New York from 1952 to 1963, and throughout that time he was known as the most spectacularly savage of critics, a stiletto-toting wit who could coin a telling phrase and make it stick. … He was also a moral idiot, … a critic in whom talent and triviality were always at odds.”

“I’m not a success,” Cliburn announced with stunning foresight after winning in Moscow. “I’m just a sensation.” Yet this pianist, who readily admitted he did not like to practice, became a slave to his celebrity.

“He had several very good years as a pianist, but he burned out, never really growing into a mature artist. He appears to have tried too hard to please, to live up to what had become the impossible expectations.”

“With over 260 recordings to her credit, she was arguably the most recorded organist and is only one of two people to have recorded the complete works of Bach three times … as well as the complete works of 12 other composers.”

“More than two-and-a-half centuries after the fact, a prominent Finnish ophthalmologist is offering what he calls a “plausible diagnosis” of the great composer: intractable secondary glaucoma, brought on by a botched eye operation.”

“A year ago, I could barely move my legs, let alone walk,” he said. He now walks with the help of a walker and his physical therapists, though only for short distances.

“One of the founding executives of Granada TV in the mid 1950s, Forman went on to become is joint managing director and chairman between 1974 and 1987. He was responsible for a new generation of programmes that helped to redefine British TV,” including Coronation Street, World in Action, Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown.”