Category: people

Domingo turned 70 in January: did he imagine the moment quite like this? “It’s quite an event for me,” he responds. “And whatever I imagined, I never thought that I would still be singing. Conducting, yes. But this is a bonus.” Hard to imagine, too, that his tenor record of 130 operatic roles will be topped. “One hundred and thirty-six roles,” he corrects me, courteously.

“I prefer to paint; I don’t have to translate anything. I don’t have to know if it is good or bad while I am working. I don’t want to think when I am working. Even if I am making a movie, I get to a point where I throw the script away. I know what I want people to do and ultimately it is a spontaneous kind of activity.”

“‘I think so, yes, honestly, yes,’ Murakami says. At the same time, his expenses are high: He employs about 200 people, and has costly travel and communications bills.Surprisingly, the artist says he lives in a small apartment. ‘I cannot buy my home yet,’ he says. His salary is ‘a small amount of money’.”

“Remarkably, given his Mubarak ties, Zahi Hawass has been able to hold on to his government post through the aftershocks of the revolution, though he resigned briefly in March and was reinstated.”

“Ask them why, and you get a flood of reasons: Nostalgia, politics, quality. They do not share a hive (analog) mind – each has his or her reasons. In fact, if they share anything, it’s this: A desire for a more tactile world.”

“Producing scores of plays that brought actors from Buster Keaton to Al Pacino to Boston was only part of Mr. Rosenfeld’s contributions to the arts in Boston, however. From publishing to opera to endowing concerts at the Museum of Fine Arts and a chair for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, his hand brushed across the city’s creative spectrum.”

US video artist Bill Viola, Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta, British actress Judi Dench, British sculptor Anish Kapoor and Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa are the winners of the annual 15 million yen prize (currently about $186,000).

“Miranda July is the kind of artist who switches media about as frequently as most of us replace toothbrushes, bouncing from performance art to visual art, to movies to fiction. Now she’s taking on the craft of fortune-telling” and is offering her services to public radio listeners.

He co-founded both Opera magazine and Opera North and chaired the British Board of Film Classification, but Harewood made his greatest mark as managing director of English National Opera during the “powerhouse” years, when he hired such directors as Nicholas Freeman, Nick Hytner, Jonathan Miller and Harry Kupfer to stage productions.

“What is clear to me is that science is essential to medicine. But just because you’re a great scientist doesn’t make you a healer. Yes, you might be able to fix something, but it doesn’t mean you can heal a person. I think more health professions may evolve that have more to do with healing as doctors have more and more obligations to keep up with science.”