Category: people

“Louis LeRoy, executive director of the Yuma Fine Arts Association since 2002, died early Monday morning at Yuma Regional Medical Center, ending the career of a man whose life and love were entwined in art.”

“Huge talent with polymath abilities and catholic tastes. Musician who actually enjoys giving audiences what they want. Maestro with charm to chat up donors and even carry on e-mail exchanges with fans. Plays piano like a dream.”

It includes more than 150 boxes of manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, photographs and emails from the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature.

“Arrested and charged with criminal damage in front of a crowd of horrified tourists, he ended up being punched and dragged across a police cell. The story illustrates what little space is left for spontaneity, or even the gentlest subversion, on our streets.”

The surprising thing about Viva La Diva is not that Darcey Bussell agreed to do it but that Katherine Jenkins steals most of her thunder. Unlike Bussell, who spent almost 20 years in the rarefied world of classical ballet, Jenkins is a popular entertainer who has dubbed herself the “opera Madonna”.

English National Ballet dancer Simone Clarke has taken a leading role in a nationalist organisation with links to the British National party. “The ballerina, who is expected to retire soon, has been elected to the executive board of Solidarity, a trade union which says it aims to protect the rights of British workers.”

There has been no shortage of paeans to composer Elliott Carter over the last few years. But what is it that makes the 99-year-old composer so fascinating to so many? Perhaps it’s the remarkable fact that Carter has never settled comfortably into a single style or groove, and has instead continued to audibly evolve in his work when most composers would have long since settled for consistency.

“Stockhausen’s parsimonious control of his own music and his disastrous public statements have hurt his present-day reputation enormously. And yet I can think of few late-20th-century composers who are more likely to be explored and debated by whatever passes for the musical intelligentsia of 2057.”

“Andrew Imbrie, the composer of many arresting and impeccably crafted musical works and a generous teacher to several generations of younger composers, died Wednesday at his Berkeley home after a long illness.”