Category: people

This weekend the soprano with the big name, big hair and big voice gives her first performance since emergency open-heart surgery in June to repair a dissected aorta. “It’s horrible,” she says. “It’s not necessarily the singing that is stressful – it’s kind of everything that surrounds it, you know, like, the rehearsal process and the nerves and wanting to remember and wanting to be good.”

“I’m tired of traveling and tired of being underpaid. … And I want to spend more time with my family. But then I get asked [to direct] again, and it sounds interesting.”

“Charles Gwathmey, an architect who turned his love of Modernism and passion for geometrical complexity into a series of compelling houses and sometimes controversial public buildings, died in Manhattan on Monday. … Mr. Gwathmey was part of a generation of architects who put their own aesthetic stamp on the ‘high Modernist’ style developed in the early 20th century by Le Corbusier and others.”

“Florence ‘Floss’ Schumacher, a doyenne of Orange County’s social and arts scene for nearly three decades who was instrumental in establishing the Orange County Performing Arts Center and several performing arts organizations, has died. … She played a key role in the beginnings of resident companies at the performing arts center — the Pacific Symphony, the Pacific Chorale, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County and the now-defunct Opera Pacific, which folded last year after 22 seasons.”

“Looked at in aggregate, Laurents’s life has an improbable Forrest Gump air of having encompassed great swaths of history and the famous figures within it.”

“An art finance company that lent Annie Leibovitz $24 million against the rights to her photographs and properties has filed a lawsuit asking a judge to order her to allow real estate agents into her homes in Greenwich Village and Rhinebeck, N.Y., so they can be sold to pay her debts.”

“The character he created and then lived in for decades, a seemingly effortless production that was actually the result of years of practice and refinement and discipline, was an ideal of the ascendant American male (as observed by a young immigrant Cockney vaudevillian): urbane but athletic, absurdly handsome but self-effacing, a joker who could be a bit of a cad, even a little cruel, but would always do the right thing in the end.”

“He has learned the music but not the lingo. Keith Miller is perhaps the only opera singer who can talk about ‘running an aria’ the way a fullback talks about running for daylight – as he used to do, before he called an audible on his football career.”

“George Russell, a composer, educator and theorist who had a powerful effect on the jazz forms and methods that have evolved from the 1950s to the present, has died. … A MacArthur Foundation Award winner, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and a Distinguished Artist-in-Residence Emeritus at the New England Conservatory, where he taught for 35 years, Russell died Monday in Boston of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.”

Scott Adams “was a cartoonist, but he was also an engineer, and both fields have a tendency to attract stubborn people who are immune to rejection and who disregard obstacles.” He needed all those qualities, plus his considerable powers of observation, over the past four years as he dealt with vocal cords that simply stopped working at certain times and places.