Category: people

“Of all the great American composers, he was and continues to be the hardest sell. He never managed to persuade the vast majority of performers and audiences that caring if they listened as well as caring about musical integrity were possible and necessary.”

“Among Indian public intellectuals, a bright category that includes the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Roy is probably now her country’s most globally famous polemicist, as both a writer and speaker.”

“Melville, who was just 31, had never met Hawthorne. But it’s no exaggeration to say that, after a day of open-air larks, a quantity of Heidsieck champagne, several impromptu toasts and a sudden downpour, the younger man was enraptured with his new friend who had, he wrote, ‘dropped germinous seeds into my soul’.”

“When people accuse my work of being political agitprop, I say it’s quite the opposite. Art is one of the only non-propaganda experiences you can have. Today, someone is always trying to sell you something or convince you of something. I’m creating this radically open space that you haven’t had access to before.”

“She made her acclaimed operatic debut with Welsh National Opera as Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage Of Figaro in 1962 before becoming famous overnight when she stood in for Teresa Berganza at the Royal Opera House.”

“The filmmaker, who will direct The Hobbit, was admitted to hospital on Wednesday with acute stomach pains and had surgery that night for a perforated ulcer.”

“Mr. Babbitt, who had a lively sense of humor despite the reputation for severity that his music fostered, sometimes referred to himself as a maximalist to stress the musical and philosophical distance between his style and the simpler, more direct style of younger contemporaries like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other Minimalist composers. It was an apt description.”

Michael Tilson Thomas has two long-running orchestra gigs.”Even good relationships between conductors and orchestras can lose a little chemistry. But he is a cultural force in San Francisco, and the vitality of the orchestra is palpable. Next season it celebrates its centennial. Meanwhile, a spirit of renewal pervades the New World Symphony.”

The novelist, who was also a self-taught lepidopterist, “came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves. Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime.” They do now.

“Among the events covered in the letters is the October 1992 fire that destroyed Salinger’s home, as well as comments about his garden, his family and U.S. and world politics. He also remarks on his favorite fast-food chain — Burger King.”