Category: people

As founder and director of the Amor Artis orchestra and chorale, Somary spent nearly 50 years championing neglected works, mostly from the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 1970s, he made the first recordings of Handel’s oratorios Theodora and Jephtha.

The actor “was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a Holden Caulfieldish wastrel raised on an Edwardian 55-acre estate with its own lake … His stiff patrician bearing was slightly redundant when deployed in the service of patricians, but transplanted into the bodies of toughs, condemned men, and private eyes … the result was a brand of hard-bitten, rueful integrity that fit the times like a glove.”

“The long-time curator of Baltimore’s Edgar Allan Poe House says the museum could be forced to close if city officials stick to their insistence” that the museum wean itself from municipal funding by July 2012.

The village in which he was born 200 years ago was called Dobotján at the time; it’s now on the Austrian side of the border and called Raiding. He was happy to tell his audience in Budapest, “Je suis hongrois” – in French. Hungary claims him now, but was Liszt really a proto-citizen of the European Union?

“An artist in the Hindustani, or North Indian, musical tradition, Mr. Joshi was renowned as a master of the khayal, a genre of vocal concert music. … [He] was familiar to a vast public in South Asia through his live concerts, many recordings and performances on Indian film soundtracks.”

“[A] pure and ebullient stylist of the American songbook who became an important member of the cabaret circuit during the 1990s and early years of this century,” Haran was hit by a car while bicycling in Florida, which she had recently made her home.

“In May 1861, while Clemens was traveling up the Mississippi aboard the steamer Nebraska, a Union artillery battery blockading the river fired a warning shot across her bow. When the vessel failed to stop, a second shot smashed through her smokestack. … The Mississippi River that Sam Clemens had known suddenly existed no longer.”

“Although Schneider would go on to appear in more than a dozen more films, most notably Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), and had a few years in the 1970s marked by drug addiction, overdoses and a suicide attempt, she still seemed to retain the innocent face and artless persona” of her character in Tango.

“Already, he has been featured in glossy magazines like Details, which photographed him shirtless, hanging from a barre, in a profile last December that said he was about to ‘leap into the upper echelon of celebrity.’ … But now, as [Natalie] Portman’s fiancé, Mr. Millepied has become tabloid fodder.”

“He loved music above all things, and because he cared so deeply about every aspect of it, he was greatly misunderstood.”