Category: people

The passing of Nobel Prize winner, foremost contemporary Russian novelist, and former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn over the weekend warrants recounting the stations of his lifelong struggle against totalitarianism.

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed.”

“Sir Salman Rushdie is threatening to sue a former police bodyguard who has written a book about protecting the author while he was in hiding… In the book, he claims Sir Salman was nicknamed “Scruffy” and was once locked in a cupboard because he irritated his protection officers. They then all went to the pub.”

Donald Runnicles probably flies just under the radar of many music aficionados, but he’s quietly become one of the more in-demand conductors in the classical music world. “The man who first conducted at the Metropolitan Opera 20 years ago and made an early Bayreuth debut thrives in music that requires the generalissimo treatment – wielding big forces and big scores into coherent statements of sound.”

“Alice Chalifoux, the diminutive, salty-tongued and beloved former principal harp of the Cleveland Orchestra, died Thursday at the age of 100… Chalifoux, who became a centenarian in January, was a legend in the music world. She served as principal harp in the Cleveland Orchestra from 1931 to 1974,” and taught many of the top harpists in the business at Oberlin and Cleveland Institute of Music.

“In the middle of the night on Aug. 7, 1974, a French high-wire artist named Philippe Petit broke into the just-built World Trade Center with a small band of accomplices. As dawn was breaking, the men strung a cable between the Twin Towers, upon which Petit proceeded to walk for 45 minutes, crossing back and forth eight times as he danced, knelt, and lay down on the wire… The final prize [wasn’t] a vault full of cash but an act of pure, useless, and terrifying beauty.”

“At the busy height of his unlikely career Elliott Gould was as much an embodiment of the times as a movie star. As the 1960s faded into the ’70s, Mr. Gould appeared in role after role that seemed to crystallize the ideals and anxieties of the era… Mr. Gould, who turns 70 on Aug. 29, is being honored in his native borough, Brooklyn, with a series at BAMcinématek.”

“The Brazilian musician and Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, says he is standing down from the government to concentrate on his music career… As culture minister, he championed sometimes neglected forms of cultural expression such as indigenous painting. However it was always clear that he hankered to return to his artistic career, and some critics questioned the level of commitment to his political role.”

A dedicated suffragette who went to prison for her activism, Ethel Smyth’s “colourful life and reputation have tended to overshadow the thing she cared about most – her music.” Now her double concerto for violin and horn is getting a prominent performance at the BBC Proms.

Many artists achieve their greatest fame posthumously, but it’s relatively rare for the world to be completely unaware that such an artist exists until his death. But that’s how it was for Henry Darger, who died in 1973, leaving behind “three massive manuscripts… and a trove of watercolors and collages he’d created to illustrate his stories.”