Category: people

“Earl Wild, an American pianist and composer who was renowned for his performances of the virtuoso showpieces of the grand Romantic tradition but whose enormous repertory included everything from Baroque works and Mozart concertos to contemporary scores, died Saturday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif.”

“I don’t have a style, but the books do. Each demands its own method of presentation, and I like that. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn’t write without feeling he was repeating himself. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a writer. A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.”

“It is evident that he likes to be in control – whether it be his own farmyard, his own opera productions or his own CD company, which Isabella, a former recording executive, runs for him. That may explain why he has never held a position with a conventional orchestra or opera company for long. Musicians accustomed to democratic structures are turned off by his exacting standards and a dictatorial style that has bordered on rudeness in the past.”

“At age 69, I have little to look forward to,” convicted swindler and former Metropolitan Opera philanthropist Alberto Vilar wrote the federal judge due to sentence him Feb. 5. “I am not in good health. I ask your honor to grant me time outside of prison during the few years left to me.”

“The prodigious 28-year-old’s sprawling body of work already extends across classical music — chamber, choral, orchestral — to film soundtracks (his sombre, spare score for Stephen Daldry’s Oscar-winning drama The Reader), ballet scores and arrangements for the cultish pop artists Björk and Antony and the Jonsons. His creative weapons of choice, too, are an omnivore’s.”

They “confirm, if any confirmation were needed, his ineradicable grounding in the Edwardian world of his boyhood. … Cold weather is ‘beastly’, while ‘monstrous’ can be applied to anything from a slag heap to the remnant of a pie left in a lodging house pantry. From his upbringing, too, comes that infallible habit of trying to ‘place’ people … and – for all the instinctive fair-mindedness – arriving at a judgement based on class or gender divides.”

“In recent years, the 72-year-old actor has become something of a renaissance man: in 2007 he wrote, directed and scripted a film called Slipstream. Last year, his composition The Masque of Time was given its world premiere by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Now there’s the painting … ranging from traditional landscapes to much darker and more garish images.”

“I’ve become a bit reclusive. Five years ago, when I took the decision to stop acting or directing, I found this situation ideal. Nobody in San Diego is too much interested in literature. They’re interested in the length of your surfboard.”

“The so-called ‘relics of Joan of Arc,’ overseen by the Archbishop of Tours in Chinon, France, do not contain the charred remains of the Catholic saint. Rather, the artifacts consist of a mummified cat leg bone and human rib, both dating to the 6th-3rd century B.C., according to a new study.”

“‘What is happening is that I am re-creating a concert last year I did at the Hollywood Bowl and toured America with,’ she explained. ‘It’s with full symphony orchestra and singers. The first half is all Rodgers and Hammerstein music as it is related to me, so it’s footage and narration and storytelling.’ And, yes, a bit of singing from Andrews.”