Category: people

Conductor Richard “Bradshaw’s British passport went missing on June 8, one week before he was to have led two concert performances of Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco in Budapest. A statement from the COC said that ‘despite exhausting every possible resource,’ the English-born conductor has received ‘little or no assistance from the British Identity and Passport Service,’ which has refused his request for an emergency 24-hour passport.”

“Gelsey Kirkland, returning to American Ballet Theater as a performer after 23 years, suffered a burn to her hand during a performance of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ at the Metropolitan Opera House on Saturday night, the company said.” (first item)

“Lee Nagrin, a noted Off Broadway performance artist, director and member of Meredith Monk’s theater company, The House, died Thursday in Manhattan.”

“Amy Sullivan, who as executive director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., restored the finances of an institution long known for discovering significant playwrights early in their careers, died Sunday at her home in Old Lyme, Conn. She was 54. The cause was cancer, her husband, Bruce Josephy, said.”

The Carnegie Hall tribute was an all-star gala to celebrate the famous Canadian jazz pianist. “On an evening dedicated to celebrating the Canadian jazz giant’s career, one which organizers had privately hoped would provide him with one last opportunity to take the stage where he first snagged the world’s attention with a surprise 1949 appearance, Peterson, 81, was at the last minute declared too ill to make the trip.”

After 16 years, Baltimore Sun theatre critic Wynn Rousuck is packing it in. “By modest estimate, I have seen more than 3,000 productions during my years as theater critic. Among those have been at least one performance of every play by William Shakespeare — from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s lavish stagings to an adaptation of The Tempest performed by a single actor with a doll and a Bic lighter.”

It’s been ten years since the pianist regained the use of both his hands for playing the piano. “Several weeks shy of his 80th birthday, Mr. Fleisher maintains a schedule most people half his age would find exhausting, performing widely and recording, most recently, the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Emerson String Quartet, just released by Deutsche Grammophon. He rejects the suggestion that he’s making up for lost time.”

“For nearly 60 years, Kirchner, 88, has whacked his own path through the modernist forest, writing music of brawny expression, vivacious energy, theatrical gestures and dark passions. But despite a fast start to his career in the late ’40s and early ’50s, a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and some starry champions along the way like cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who studied with him at Harvard, Kirchner never quite shed his reputation as an academic composer. He had the misfortune of becoming highly respected and perennially underrated at the same time.” video

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won this year’s Orange Prize. “After the publication of her first book Purple Hibiscus, one critic described Ms Adichie as ‘Chinua Achebe’s 21st Century daughter’. With a mathematics professor father and her mother a university administrator, Ms Adichie was not expected to become a writer.”

British Early Music specialist Robert King faces four years in prison for assaulting underage boys. Igor Toronyi-Lalic regrets the loss. “Above all, however, he provided me with some of the most intense musical experiences I’ve ever had and, for me – though obviously not the courts – these and his golden recordings have put him beyond reproach. He was also about the only person in Classical Music who, when he opened his mouth, could actually be funny. He was the supreme raconteur and always had the audiences in the palm of his hand.”