Gustavo Dudamel “is a sensation and pretty much still always a surprise. When he begins as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the fall, he is expected to generate a huge amount of attention, no matter how celebrity-saturated the city. But even a conducting sensation has to learn the music director business somewhere, to say nothing of a broad repertory of pieces. That’s where Gothenburg comes in.”
Category: people
Charles Russell, 93, Helped Revive Noel Coward’s Career
“The theatrical impresario Charles Russell, who has died at the age of 93, worked for many years with Noël Coward. He made his entry into showbusiness in Coward’s 1942 film In Which We Serve, and was responsible for reviving the playwright’s postwar fortunes, acting as his New York business manager from the mid-1950s until the two had a final, disastrous falling out in the early 1960s.”
The Obamas’ Night Out
“I am taking my wife to New York City,” the president said in the statement, “because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished.”
Susan Boyle Moved To “Safe House” Before Show
“One judge, Piers Morgan, confirmed that she had become so ‘distraught’ at negative media headlines this week that she almost quit the ITV show.”
Lars Von Trier Explains His Bad Self
“There is no denying that von Trier is a provocateur. He describes the device as ‘a tool’. Saying he’s the best director, making challenging films, creating a furore has been his way of getting what are essentially small-budget films from Denmark noticed.” Of his alleged misogyny, he says, “I think I’ve always been the female characters in all my films, you know, the men tend to just be stupid.”
Britain’s Most Fearsome Composer On Turning 75
“‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ he says, in the flat Lancashire burr that is variously used to kill off a timorous suggestion stone dead or to give a grudging answer. ‘I still feel like I’m the same thing. I started life with an idea in my head about music and I still feel I’m in that position.'”
Tracey Emin Says She Is So Over Sex
“‘It always was about sex, not money,’ she said. ‘Sex was what held me in bed and got me out of it again in the morning. But now it’s fading fast. I don’t have the same craziness about sex that I had – I’m more interested in ideas.’ The artist was haloed by a pink glow emanating from a neon piece in the next room. Its inscription read: ‘Oh Christ I just wanted you to f*** me and then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me.'”
The Kundera-Secret Police Scandal And Its Kundera-esque Paradox
“Whatever one concludes about [his] guilt [in allegedly betraying someone to the secret police in 1950], it is possible to imagine that the allegation was less dismaying to the writer than the form it took and the attention it drew. Having one’s past splashed across front pages and reduced to a sound bite seems like the nightmare fulfillment of the issues Kundera has been exploring in his nonfiction for the past twenty years.”
Prokofiev As Chronicler Of His Own Youth
“[His] diaries have nothing of the routine stamp; they are on occasion confessional but often resemble a series of sketches, like a novelist’s notes on people and events worth remembering. They were written when time allowed, sometimes a ‘chapter’ per month rather than daily or weekly entries. Prokofiev had ambitions as a writer … (Over the years, he penned a handful of rather good short stories.)”
The Bloomsbury Group And The Birth Of Modern Manners
“Its young mix of writers, thinkers, and artists stood at the vanguard of a shift in manners away from nineteenth-century formality and reticence and toward twentieth-century candor and playfulness. Male and female, mostly in their twenties, the Bloomsbury lot addressed each other by their first names, spoke openly about sexual matters, and, till the wee hours of the morning, reflected on how to spend their lives.”