Category: people

“Fresh-faced, freckled, with a snub nose, a shock of bright red hair and a penchant for plus-fours, 15-year-old boy scout and car showroom clerk Palle Huld left Copenhagen on March 1 [in 1928] and duly circled the globe – including then-wartorn Manchuria and foreigner-unfriendly Moscow – by train and passenger liner.”

“Winfrey gave him a warm, hug-filled reception on Monday’s program, though he was the hour’s third guest, following education reformer Michelle Rhee and a family of Michael Jackson confidantes.”

His career spanned most of the 20th century and an extraordinary range of repertoire: Monteverdi (under Nadia Boulanger), Machaut, Mozart, Bach, Couperin, Dowland, Schubert, Satie and even Noel Coward. He sang at Glyndebourne 480 times, created a role for Stravinsky, made his Met debut at age 85 and his Wigmore Hall debut at 86, and performed into his 90s.

“A concert and oratorio singer who performed in public until she was in her 90s, Mrs. Boatwright was known for her pure, unfussy sound; impeccable diction; and thoughtful, sensitive interpretations. These attributes made her well suited for early music and contemporary works, and throughout her career she sang both, to favorable notices.”

“Though he lived for 40 years, Lennon’s reputation as a peacenik derives from just a brief period in the very late ’60s and early ’70s, when antiwar attitudes were practically de rigueur among the hip cognoscenti. Until then, he had largely kept quiet about politics. … The peace protests that Lennon is best known for probably were not even his own ideas; more likely, they were [Yoko] Ono’s.”

“Half the fun of the Kennedy Center Honors, and almost all of the surprise, comes from who shows up to celebrate whom each year.”

“An investigation into accusations of child molestation by one of the world’s leading classical musicians, Mikhail Pletnev, has been formally dropped without charges being pressed, the Russian National Orchestra (RNO) has confirmed.”

“It was hard to get on track, any track, after the note’s arrival, and finally, when I answered submitted questions that had been selected by the people in charge, I knew I would have rather died onstage with art talk than with the predictable questions that had been chosen for me.”

“Along with the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko (her first husband) and Andrei Voznesensky, she became one of the bold new voices in contemporary Russian literature [during the thaw after Stalin’s death], attracting ecstatic audiences of thousands to readings at concert halls and stadiums.”

“China’s best-known artist Ai Weiweihas been stopped from leaving the country minutes before he was to board his plane, he told the Guardian.”