Category: people

He was chiefly renowned for his intimate personal and professional association with George Gershwin; after Gershwin’s early death in 1937, Levant virtually owned Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F. For a time, during the 1940s, he was the highest-paid concert pianist in the United States, spicing his performances with banter and self-lacerating quips. Assaying Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata, he might promise to play “with my customary arthritic abandon” and add: “This piece has never had a worthy interpretation. And it still won’t.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Mr. Bylsma’s 1979 recording of the Bach suites was widely credited with being the first performed on a period instrument using gut strings, which were typical of cellos of earlier eras. Pablo Casals’ historic recordings of these scores in the late 1930s, after long neglect, had brought them to wider attention. Today they are the most performed works for solo cello. – The New York Times

It seems there’s a moral spectrum in play: Scientists found that people would probably lie if they thought a big corporation, like say, Starbucks or Walmart, would foot the bill for the deceit. They told the truth if they felt like an individual proprietor of a business or a specific employee would have to pay for their dishonesty. – Mic

Phil Kennicott: “Death and remembrance, at least, come with the customs and norms that have been shredded in most of the rest of public life. If nothing else, death still inspires a pause in ordinary life and, in the case of artists, a respectful consideration of their habitually ignored accomplishments.” – Washington Post

Not David Marchese’s writing; he does a fine job. But Cage showed up for the interview wearing “oversize sunglasses, a dragon ring the size of a walnut and a black velveteen jacket over a Bruce Lee T-shirt.” He says that he has based various performances on his pet cobras, Woody Woodpecker, Stockhausen, and Pokey. (That’s Gumby’s sidekick, the orange horse.) He talks about his grail quest that was and was not metaphorical. (The Holy Grail, he has determined, is the Earth.) And he says about his acting, “I’m [now] at the top of my game.” – The New York Times Magazine

“The painter, known for his wry, carefully composed investigations into the nature of art making — say, analyzing every shade of paint used in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, then rendering those shades in abstraction — was also profoundly dedicated to his students as a professor of painting and drawing at UCLA, where he taught for more than three decades.” – Los Angeles Times

He began his career on conventional instruments and spent six years as the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s principal cellist before becoming one of the key artists of the European period-instrument movement in the 1970s and onward. Among his dozens of recordings as soloist and chamber musician, he’s most admired for two recordings of Bach’s Cello Suites, each considered revelatory in its time. – The Strad

“The first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, … Ms Morrison placed African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying as powerfully, or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after it ended.” – The Washington Post

No figure in Broadway history had a bigger influence on how shows looked and behaved in the second half of the 20th century. – Los Angeles Times

Pennebaker’s documentary filmmaking stretched across more than six decades, and in that time, he “chronicled a who’s who of other pop music and entertainment world figures and icons over the course of his long career, including John Lennon, David Bowie, Jane Fonda, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry and the Monterey Pop Festival.” Then there’s Dont Look Back. – Los Angeles Times