Category: people

“In her essay collection Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (1995), Ms. Holland put forward a hedonist’s credo. ‘Joy has been leaking out of our life,’ she wrote.”

“To me, there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”

“Thirty years after his death on Sept. 15, 1980, Evans is omnipresent in a range of pianists that includes Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Fred Hersch, Jessica Williams, Billy Childs, Bill Mays, Denny Zeitlin, Larry Willis and–this is not a stretch–hundreds of others.”

His lifelong mission to bring classical music to underserved audiences led him to conduct orchestras as far afield as Moldova, Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam. Yet Ansbacher remains best known for the concerts – always free of charge – he and the BLO gave on the Boston Esplanade and in unusual venues throughout greater Boston.

An A-to-Z of the poet’s life and loves, especially in Brazil: Petrópolis, the wealthy resort community near which Bishop and Lota Soares lived; “Questions of Travel,” a Bishop poem set at that country retreat; Robert Lowell, Bishop’s champion and mentor; Suicide, which Lota committed while visiting Bishop in New York; and so on.

“From their first performance to Diaghilev’s death, the Ballets Russes were in a state of acute financial crisis, and neither the company nor its director ever had a permanent home. The strategies with which Diaghilev addressed these obstacles are astonishingly modern in their scope. He was a master of spin with a sophisticated understanding of the nature of celebrity and power, a consummate networker, and he knew exactly how to manipulate the press.”

He “found common cause with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and others who regarded folk music as a form of political protest and a way of affirming the dignity of working people.” In 1950 he founded the influential folk music magazine Sing Out!.

None other than Christopher Wheeldon asked the award-winning, slightly pudgy Beale to play the Duchess in the new Alice in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet. Says SRB, “I am completely and utterly incompetent at dance, but I’m thrilled.”

“It gets [an audience] in the door, but 20 rows back, no one can tell the difference. You really can’t. … “[If] you’re going to see Erwin Schrott or Anna Netrebko and they’re really hot and you tell [people] this enough times, even if they’re sitting 50 rows back they’re going to think, ‘Wow, I’m watching a really sexy, attractive person onstage.’ And their brain fills in what the eye is not catching.”

“Margery Booth was one of many beautiful and talented opera singers chosen to perform before Adolf Hitler as part of the dictator’s efforts to demonstrate the cultural superiority of the German nation.”