Category: people

Conductor Alan Gilbert, who has been much discussed as a darkhorse candidate to become the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, has announced that he is leaving Santa Fe Opera after four years as music director to pursue other conducting opportunities.

“Little more than a week after the burial of her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishnevskaya has contracted pneumonia and is recovering at her country home near Moscow.”

“Henry LeTang, a tap dance teacher and Tony-winning choreographer who taught many of the biggest names in dance, including Chita Rivera, Gregory Hines and Savion Glover, died April 26. He was 91. … In recent years LeTang had lived in Las Vegas and continued coaching dancers at his home until a few months ago.”

“Having fashioned himself as a sort of painterly Publius, Banksy surfaces from time to time to prod the popular conscience. Confronted with a blank surface, he will cover it with scenes of anti-authoritarian whimsy: Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policemen kissing, a military helicopter crowned by a pink bow. Typically crafting his images with spray paint and cardboard stencils, Banksy is able to achieve a meticulous level of detail.”

St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts has tapped a native Californian with longstanding ties to Minnesota to be its new chief executive. “Patricia Mitchell’s first job out of college was at the [Minneapolis-based] Guthrie Theater,” and she went on to head opera companies in LA and San Francisco, and to serve as COO of the LA Philharmonic. In St. Paul, she will take over a venue with a long history of difficult relations with its resident companies.

Bernard Taper, “a longtime writer for the New Yorker, one-time Chronicle reporter and retired UC Berkeley journalism professor, has become the poster child for the countless artworks stolen by Hitler and his Nazi henchmen from Jewish homes and art galleries, civic museums, private collections and churches across Europe — tens of thousands of them still missing — during the reign of the Third Reich.”

Star violinist Joshua Bell is headed back to Bloomington. Indiana University, Bell’s alma mater, has hired him as “senior lecturer” beginning with the 2008-09 school year. Bell will join a prestigious faculty that has historically included some of America’s greatest instrumental performers. He will not teach full-time, and plans to maintain his busy touring schedule.

“The American Association of Museums has selected [Ford Watson] Bell, 57, as its new president, marking its first change of leadership in 20 years.” Bell has a long history with museums and other non-profits in Minnesota, where he also mounted an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in 2006.

Violinist Leila Josefowicz is undeniably beautiful, a fact which should have been nothing but a help to her career in an age when sex is used to sell even classical music. But Josefowicz never wanted any part of the pouting sex kitten persona that so many other young female violinists have embraced in recent years, and she believes that her determination to keep her audience’s minds on the music has helped her reputation of a serious performer and champion of new music.

“For a man so driven by idealism and emotion, he was shrewd as an actuary when it came to money and sometimes downright greedy. He was the highest paid soloist of his day, at $45,000 a night, and among the top conductors. He loved property and bought homes in Paris, Lausanne and London (later also in Moscow and St Petersburg), starting with a flat in Holloway and trading up to half a house in Maida Vale. Since he was never in the same town two weeks running, he made new friends in the street to do his house-sitting.”