Category: people

“London’s Kings Place opens today — giving the city a new arts venue and fulfilling the dream of its creator Peter Millican.” Millican, an organic farmer and amateur violist, put up the lion’s share of the £100m to build what critics are calling “a superb and elegant space, more beautiful than many of London’s music venues.”

John Stuart Mill “believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind.”

“Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. … Ms. Gayle’s crowning achievement was helping to win the establishment of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, encompassing 26 blocks in what was originally an industrial quarter known as Hell’s Hundred Acres.”

“Alberto W. Vilar, the opera lover and disgraced patron of the arts, took center stage in a federal courtroom on Monday, when his trial for securities fraud opened with a prosecutor describing him as a lying fraudster who finagled money out of clients. Defense lawyers gave a contrasting view, portraying him as a top-rated investment adviser who made millions for big pension funds and individuals and returned ‘every penny’ to his clients.”

“Konstantin Pavlov, a poet and screenwriter who became one of Bulgaria’s most prominent intellectuals with his rare defiance of the country’s Communist regime, died on Sunday. He was 75.”

A portrait of the “pugilistic” director rehearsing Manon at Lyric Opera of Chicago: he coaches; he rants; he flutters a fan; he kisses Natalie Dessay (repeatedly); he gets down on the floor with Jonas Kauffman; he tells the chorus, “I need a gaggle of trollops!”

“Marian Griffiths, who was for two decades the director of the Sculpture Center in its original Manhattan location, transforming it into a dynamic exhibition center that helped draw public attention to the medium, died at her home in Manhattan on Sept. 8. She was 86.”

“Holland’s long-time modern music champion, Reinbert De Leeuw… and his players [in the Schoenberg Ensemble] have forged remarkable bonds with a veritable who’s who of European modern music masters,” and literally changed the way the world listens to new music. “Wonderful things are happening and there’s much more variety in musical life than there was 40 years ago. We had to fight for it. Now there’s a much more favourable climate.”

He’s not really a household name, although his face would be familiar to most Americans, and he doesn’t go looking for attention. But actor Dennis Haysbert has been quietly defying Hollywood expectations for years, and as one of the few African-Americans to be entrusted with a leading dramatic role on television, he’s also changing the way the industry looks at race.

“If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist.” Newman died this weekend at his home in Connecticut after a battle with cancer.