Category: people

“He was a towering figure in the string world, a former child prodigy known for his technical brilliance and range of colour, which combined in definitive performances of Paganini.”

“She was born Isabel Vargas Lizano in Costa Rica, but audiences knew her as Chavela, a hard-partying, rabble-rousing, fiery singer who adopted Mexico as her homeland and began singing on the streets in her early teens.”

“Joan Stein, a producer of Tony best-play winner Side Man, the recent Broadway musical Catch Me If You Can and Los Angeles productions of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile among other plays, as well as a variety of TV efforts, died Friday in Los Angeles.”

“While Mr. Segal was generous with his money, he was perhaps most admired for the donations he managed to extract from others. He used to say he had no trouble giving people the ‘opportunity’ to contribute to the causes he cared most about, whether it be Lincoln Center’s redevelopment project, which updated the campus; Public Radio International (formerly American Public Radio), of which he was a founding member; or the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, editions of America’s most significant writing.”

“Ms. Ursuleasa, who was performing internationally by the time she was a teenager, was known for her large tone, fleet fingers and eclectic programming, though she was perhaps most closely associated with Romantic composers like Prokofiev, Chopin and Schumann.”

“Recently, Mr. Smith wrote a brief obituary of himself, in third-person singular. It says, ‘He used to muse that if there was an afterlife — granted a long shot, he said — he’d love it for the opportunities offered to interview people he studied in life.'”

“Everything I do is pretty much the same as it was; we tour like we used to. But the venues are bigger. There’s more access to publicity, so the promoters know there’s a better chance of selling more tickets. The good thing has been that because we can play bigger venues, I can bring a bigger band.” But Spaulding still can’t get her songs on the radio.

“Waren was a Jew in disguise, performing in a Nazi-held city where Jews lived under constant threat. She was a lawbreaker, hiding other Jews in her apartment, risking her own deportation to a concentration camp. And she was a smuggler, helping to supply guns to the French Resistance. ‘I think she was very scared,’ her son, Mark Waren, said in a telephone interview. ‘But I don’t think it was something she thought much about. It was simply what one did.'”

“The new critics poll from the British Film Institute has declared Hitchcock’s Vertigo the best film ever, dislodging Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane after half a century. Film fans may argue about their relative merits but enthusiasts for the music of Bernard Herrmann may not care much either way: he wrote the scores for both.”

The legendary composer will star in a new video game to be released Sept. 14. The Nintendo Wii game features (what else?) singing and dancing competitions in which up to four players can square off against each other, as well as a “career” mode where players can sing and dance their way to the top of the musical theater chain.