Category: people

“Flindt was educated at Copenhagen’s Royal Ballet School and was appointed a solo dancer at the age of 21. He then went on to begin an international dancing career with the Paris Opera Ballet and the London Festival Ballet, returning to head the Danish Royal Ballet from 1966 to 1978. In 1981 he went on to become the artistic director of the Dallas Ballet until 1988.”

This season the veteran violinist and conductor “has been marking his 60th birthday with 100 concerts in 17 countries. Yet he says that his own income is more or less back where it was 15 years ago. Zukerman sees these same stark facts everywhere in classical music – from the recording industry to non-profit arts groups… [He] even wonders whether there’s enough of an audience to support classical music 52 weeks a year.”

The Oscar-winning actress (The English Patient) “says touring for her dance collaboration with Britain choreographer Akram Khan was so exhausting she’s unlikely to take part in a similar project again. […] ‘I’m really enjoying it,’ Binoche said, but adding, ‘I’m suffering.'”

“Oscar-winning French actor Juliette Binoche said Tuesday she welcomed the critical mauling her new dance performance received when it opened in London, as it sparked improvements in the show […] and the effort had resulted in glowing reviews in Paris, Montreal and Sydney when it toured.” The piece, titled In-I, runs this month in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul.

“When Ukrainian-born writer Sholem Rabinovich died in New York City in 1916, throngs gathered in three boroughs to greet his funeral cortege. Rabinovich, who went by the pen name Sholem Aleichem (‘peace be with you’), was a humorist and a champion of the Yiddish language — in the words of his New York Times obituary, a ‘Jewish Mark Twain.'” People today are more familiar with his work than they might realize.

When Leibovitz’s longtime partner Susan Sontag died in 2004, she “bequeathed several properties to Leibovitz, who was forced to pony up half of their value to keep them.”

“If Gehry now stands atop a mountain he spent much of his career trying to ascend — driven by a fierce ambition he has often tried to conceal beneath what he calls an aw-shucks persona — he does so at a moment when the mountain itself is beginning to crumble beneath his feet. After a decade in which a handful of leading architects became global stars — with Gehry leading the charge — and private and government clients alike were willing to finance jaw-dropping feats of architectural innovation, funding for new construction has suddenly vanished, as if overnight.”

Haitink shows no signs of slowing down. CSO musicians report that the vigor he displayed on the podium during the orchestra’s recent Far East tour was undimmed from Yokohama to Beijing.

That’s the opening line of the autobiography of Christy Nolan, the prize-winning writer with cerebral palsy who died this week at 43. Francis X. Clines pays tribute, and remembers how Nolan described a book tour: “Breasting along gold limousines, tinted glass creating able access to mighty loot.”

Well, that’s what Montaigne said, perhaps summing up the point of philosophy. But look at how philosophers die: Socrates (ordered to kill himself), Hypatia (flayed by a mob of angry Christians), Francis Bacon (caught a chill while experimenting with refrigeration), Nietzche (syphilis)… and Camus, who thought no death could be more meaningless than one in a car accident. Guess how he died.