Category: people

A star of film (Reversal of Fortune, Enemies: A Love Story), stage (Speed-the-Plow, Hurlyburly) and television (The West Wing, Chicago Hope), Silver was also known for being the raging liberal firebrand who endorsed George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican convention.

“She’s a private person in a public role, a black woman in a costume drama played previously only by whites, an outspoken professional with a traditional sense of hearth and home. We all feel like we know her, but we don’t really.” A series of essays on the new First Lady and the many things she seems to signify.

An entertainment executive with a gift for launching the right idea at the right time, Livingston signed the Beatles to Capitol Records, wrote the songs in which Bozo the Clown and Tweety-Bird were born, paired Frank Sinatra with Nelson Riddle, and co-created the long-running Western series Bonanza.

“[A]t 91, Laurents is one of the few left standing from the theater’s golden age of bad behavior. As well-known as he is for his writing, he is almost better known for his wronging.”

“Anne Brown, a penetratingly pure soprano who literally put the Bess in ‘Porgy and Bess’ by inspiring George Gershwin to expand that character’s part in a folk opera that originally was to be called ‘Porgy,’ died Friday in Oslo. … Even after winning the Margaret McGill prize as the best singer at Juilliard, she had no hope in those days of reaching the top tiers of opera,” due to racial discrimination. So the Baltimore-born singer moved to Norway, where she became a citizen.

“Joseph Bloch was a learned guide for thousands of young pianists, many now among the finest alive. And though he indelibly shaped world-famous performers for nearly half a century, Mr. Bloch did so almost entirely without giving private lessons.”

“Neither image is especially masterly, or even much good at all. To use an old distinction, they’re ‘conceptual’ rather than ‘optical’–they show an assembled stack of features rather than a convincing illusion of a specific face–but the concepts are clearly articulated: he’s a bald guy with a short beard.”

Valery Gergiev’s “insertion of music into the Russian political context followed in a long tradition. But whatever you make of the politics, the performance was also characteristically Gergievian in its drive to burst through the prissy, buttoned-up corsets that bind classical music, with the aim of releasing a dangerous vitality. In that way, too, Gergiev is very Russian.”

“[He] cannot see himself retiring the way many opera stars do: by announcing a farewell tour and going from company to company, accepting tributes. ‘Rather,’ he said… ‘I think it will be one evening, after a performance, to say, That’s it.'” The tenor says he considered doing just that after the final performance of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor.

“Country singer Hank Locklin, whose smooth tenor voice on hits including ‘Send Me the Pillow You Dream On’ and ‘Please Help Me I’m Falling’ marked a career that spanned half a century, has died. He was 91. […] A performer on the Grand Ole Opry for 47 years, Locklin helped usher in ‘the Nashville Sound’ that gave country music a more lush feel.”