Category: people

“Alan Blyth, the distinguished music critic, has died from cancer two weeks after his 78th birthday. A specialist on singers and singing, Blyth held trenchant views on the modern school of opera production, particularly those offering radical reinterpretations (‘misrepresentations’ might be Blyth’s word) of the classics.”

“Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today at his home in New York.”

“Bruce Wolmer, the longtime editor and publisher of Art & Auction magazine and an expert on the heavily moneyed byways of the international art world, died in New York on Saturday.”

“Legal proceedings have been launched from all sides as the case of the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, attacked last week at the launch of her book in southern India, takes on a political dimension. The author herself faces up to two years in jail if found guilty on a charge of inciting religious tensions, launched by local police at the weekend.”

“Tikhon Khrennikov, a prolific Russian composer and pianist best known in the West as an official Soviet antagonist of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, died yesterday in Moscow. … Mr. Khrennikov, regarded as a promising young composer in the 1930s, was able to survive in the perilous currents of Soviet politics from the Stalin era on.”

“The man accused of accosting Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in a San Francisco hotel apologized to the Nobel Peace Prize winner in court Monday as Wiesel recounted what he described as his most harrowing ordeal since World War II. ‘I’m terribly sorry about what happened,’ Eric Hunt, 23, blurted out as the 78-year-old Wiesel was on the witness stand in San Francisco Superior Court at the defendant’s preliminary hearing.”

“Luciano Pavarotti has been given the go-ahead by doctors to leave the hospital where he was admitted last week with a fever, but he plans to remain for a few more days just to be sure, his wife said Tuesday.”

“Elizabeth Murray’s death is enough to teach you how separate and undisclosing an artist’s work always is. And it reminds you how imperfect the very idea of artistic expression is. We know the work rises from within her, but it doesn’t describe her or capture her. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that it expresses what she thought it was possible to express with the tools she chose.”

“Htein Lin, a political prisoner accused of planning opposition activities, has managed to smuggle out from prison more than 300 paintings and 1,000 illustrations on paper. Now, three years later, his artworks are offering a rare vision of prison life in Myanmar, formerly Burma, one of the world’s most authoritarian and closed nations.”

“Elizabeth Murray, a New York painter who reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself, died yesterday at her home in upstate New York.”