Category: people

There is no one quite like him today in the music world. At 66 Daniel Barenboim has been performing for 58 years, nearly since the days of the first commercially successful LPs.

“Donald Finkel, a noted American poet whose work teemed with curious juxtapositions, which in their unorthodoxy helped illuminate the function of poetry itself, died on Nov. 15 at his home in St. Louis.”

“Patricia Cornwell, author of the best-selling ‘Scarpetta’ thrillers, will establish a conservation scientist position at Harvard to further close examinations of art materials.” The university’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies helped Cornwell with research on her 2002 book, “Portrait of a Killer,” in which she argued that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

The magazine of lists places Michael Tilson Thomas alongside the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jeff Bezos, Robert Gates and Marian Wright Edelman, praising the San Francisco Symphony music director for his tireless and innovative efforts to attract new audiences to classical music.

“Marion Scott, a noted dancer, choreographer and teacher who returned to the stage at the age of 62 and in her 80s mounted concerts that displayed the talents of aging artists like herself, died Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. She was 86.”

Tributes are pouring in for Clive Barnes, the British-born New York critic who died yesterday after a quiet battle with cancer. “He knew his Shakespeare backward and forward, as well as his Sophocles, Ibsen, Chekhov and Congreve. He read the great novels, saw all of the great operas, loved classical music, was an expert on dance and knew one or two things about painting… At his best, Clive was a witty and vivid writer, never pompous and often downright impish.”

“Katharina Wagner, the co-director of the Bayreuth Festival and great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner, was in a car on the German autobahn when the driver died at the wheel.”

A new biography of the painter says that he freely went from one parental figure to another to another for sustenance and nourishment. “Everyone embraced him, nursed him, held him aloft.” He was also, it seems, “a social climber and a prince of self-pity. He thrived in a bloody century that killed many friends… But he saw himself as Christ on the cross.”

“A federal jury convicted Alberto W. Vilar of all 12 counts in his securities fraud trial on Wednesday, a final fall from grace for a man who gave millions of dollars to musical and other causes but was ostracized for falling short on his pledges.”