Category: people

“China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that artist Ai Weiwei, whose continued detention has drawn international criticism, has been accused on the net of ‘stealing’ the idea for a 2007 exhibit.”

An “unabashed neo-Romantic,” the Mexican-American composer was best known for his Spanish-language opera Il Postino, which had a sold-out premiere run last fall at Los Angeles Opera, with Placido Domingo singing the role of Pablo Neruda.

“[His] fusion of painting with geometric sculpture in the mid-1960s came to embody an aesthetic distinctive to postwar Los Angeles … McCracken in fact made singular painted sculptures that value a clarity of perception infused with spiritual connotations.”

“Charles Rosen has built a career as both a front-rank concert pianist and a leading writer about music. As a pianist, his 60-year career has been notable for a vast spread of music that has taken in the core classical and romantic repertoires while also fruitfully engaging with Bach, early 20th-century French music, Martinu, Bartók, the second Viennese school, Boulez and Elliott Carter.”

“It was the messy business of simply being human that the filmmaker found so compelling. Whatever the forces that pushed him in that direction, we are forever richer that he was drawn to moral ambiguity, and the high price exacted by integrity and corruption alike.”

Pianist Nick Van Bloss defies his condition in the most dramatic way. Yet “defy” is the wrong word: the 38,400 tics he endures daily may once have pushed him out of concert life, but he’s now discovered how to harness them, to a point where their rhythms have become – at least in part – the key to his singular

“I have learnt endlessly,” he says. Now, “when I go back to a favorite group in America, like Philly [the Philadelphia Orchestra], they say ‘Simon, just occasionally, a beat wouldn’t be a bad thing–if you can remember how to do that.”‘

“Although Mr. Bigelow performed as a dancer from 1946 through the 1960s, he was also known as a versatile aide-de-camp to both Lincoln Kirstein and Balanchine, City Ballet’s founders. He became an assistant to Balanchine in 1949 while still a dancer, was a production assistant from 1951 to 1977 and had the title of manager from 1978 to 1987.”

“In 2006, he set up The Freedom Theatre, a drama and community centre based in the Jenin camp, where his mother had earlier worked as a peace activist running a similar project.”