Category: people

“The 26-time Grammy winner to receive the second-ever Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, which was established to honor the career achievements of singers, songwriters and composers whose work has helped champion popular music as an art form while serving as a cultural touchstone that unites disparate groups around the world.”

“Don LaFontaine, who voiced more than 5,000 movie trailers, has died in Los Angeles aged 68… He was best known for his catchphrase used on several trailers that began with the words ‘In a world where…'”

“Is Caryl Churchill the greatest female playwright of our time? Of any time? Back in the 1980s, when she used to give press interviews, she would have slapped your wrists for asking such a sexist, reductive question. And did, whenever it was put to her. It’s her uncanny ability to pull you up, flip you over, rewire your cosy assumptions that makes Churchill such an irreducible writer”

“He provided the tools we needed to take works of art out of the frame and off the pedestal to see how they really worked. He made it possible to see, through the art, how societies organized themselves and, conversely, how individuals perceived their own experiences and inner lives.”

“It’s probably heresy to say so, but it seems censorship in its more benign manifestations — along with a skilled editor — was good for Solzhenitsyn’s prose, forcing some of the compression and ellipses that contribute so much to the power of “Ivan Denisovich” and, to a lesser extent, the other early novels.”

He’s still giving 50 concerts a year around the world. Some say it is time to stop now before his famous timbre goes, but he won’t hear of it. “I hope I can continue for another four or five years. I have great emotion every time I go on stage. Nothing in life gives me the same satisfaction that my profession gives me.”

“The longtime music director of New York’s storied Collegiate Chorale died at his home in the early morning of Aug. 25. He was 55. Bass had been suffering from the effects of Amyloidosis, a rare disease that ultimately results in heart failure.”

Newman, the doyenne of Chicago’s collectors of modern art and one of the most cosmopolitan figures on the scene, died Friday. “She had studied painting as a child at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later fulfilled several commissions for portraits, so the extraordinary collection Mrs. Newman began to build in the late 1940s was the great private one in Chicago formed with the eye of an artist.”

“The statue is part of a trend in the former Yugoslavia, as war-scarred communities honour foreign celebrities instead of local figures. In Mostar, Bosnia a bronze statue of Bruce Lee was erected in 2005, and last year the Serbian village of ÃŽitte honoured Rocky Balboa – the film character played by Sylvester Stallone – in an effort to shake off bad luck.”

“Russell, who contributed elegant, erudite art criticism for more than a half-century to The Sunday Times of London and The New York Times, where he was chief art critic from 1982 to 1990, and who helped bring a generation of postwar British artists to international attention, died on Saturday.”