Category: people

“The timing for last week’s unusual opera performance could not have been more melodramatic: Here was Italy’s best-known conductor just one week before Italy marks 150 years of unification, imploring Italians to defend their culture as he led an opera synonymous with the 19th century Risorgimento movement that galvanised Italians to seek unity.”

The 68-year-old host of A Prairie Home Companion, one of the most popular shows in U.S. public radio history, will retire in the spring of 2013, once he has found a replacement to keep the program running. Keillor suffered a mild stroke last year.

“[She] was discovered at age 5 in Argentina by the great Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky and went on to become a winsome and wide-ranging trouper of the Yiddish theater for the next 90 years.”

“I never think about that, which is why I’m delighted that two fresh faces have taken over from me at the Bouffes du Nord. The horror of someone trying to reproduce what I once did appalls me.”

“Yes, yes, she’s never taken me seriously really. And to this day – you know I just left her now – she sees me as a complainer, a hypochondriac, a kind of idiot savant. She thinks that I’m very good at what I do and absolutely terrible at everything else. And she’s probably not far off.”

He “was Chief Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Netherlands Philharmonic and Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, and principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (not to be confused with the Vienna Philharmonic). Past posts included that of principal conductor of the Bournemouth (U.K.) Symphony Orchestra and that of general music director at Berlin’s Komische Oper.”

“Though trained in the study of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, he wrote as insightfully about modern art as he did about the old masters. The titles of his two best-known books, Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth-Century Art (1972) and The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983), suggest the range of his interests.”

The 1944 MGM musical, which featured the three Judy Garland standards “The Trolley Song,” “The Boy Next Door” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “was recognized for its sparkling score, which brought a fresh complexity to the Hollywood musical.”

The woman who saved Miami’s performing arts center, “a long-time supporter of the arts and numerous other charitable causes in Miami-Dade and across the United States, has been selected to receive the 2011 Award for Outstanding Philanthropist, given by the Association of Fundraising Professionals.”

“[He] unearthed gems from his collection of 200,000 or so recordings going back to the big band era of the 1930s and sometimes the Roaring Twenties. His personal odyssey took him through more than 20 radio stations, stacks of sometimes scratchy 78 r.p.m. records and countless standards from” five decades of American popular song.