Category: people

Baitzel ran Los Angeles Opera, and was “the administrator on the scene. And he was much more. To get an idea of how much more, you need only look at the artistic profiles of Placido Domingo’s companies in D.C. and L.A. The former is conventional. L.A. Opera is anything but. In the six years that Domingo and Baitzel managed things, it grew faster than any other company in the country.”

The northern Italian town of Caravaggio celebrated its native son each year. But it turns out that “an art historian in Milan has discovered that Michelangelo Merisi — the artist’s original name — was not born in Caravaggio. He was born in Milan, on September 29, 1571, and baptised at the church of Santa Maria della Passarella. The revelation has shocked the town’s 15,000 inhabitants.”

“Edgar Baitzel, chief operating officer of Los Angeles Opera, who contributed mightily to the artistic and financial success of the company, died Sunday of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.”

“Edith d’Addario, for 43 years the director of the Joffrey Ballet School in Greenwich Village, died on March 4 in Brooklyn.”

“Pope Benedict recalls his doubts over whether Dylan should have been allowed to play a concert at the behest of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, in 1997. Describing Dylan as a type of ‘prophet’, he claimed the singer’s message diverged from that the Pope wished to convey.”

Placido Domingo’s “age-defying stamina fuels not only his performing, but his conducting, the mentoring of young artists and very personal efforts on behalf of humanitarian causes from medical research to disaster relief (he once dug in rubble with rescuers following a Mexican earthquake that took the lives of four relatives). He’s also general director of both the National Opera in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles Opera. At times, he seems a man driven, diving with superhuman energy into this next act of his life.”

“The journey of Henry Winterstern is a classic Hollywood tale: of this town’s irresistible lure, the particular hunger it breeds and the hubris that so often leads to a sudden demise. But this rapid rise and fall came with some trendy hedge-fund trimmings. A gravel-voiced, Canadian-born investor with a flair for turning around ailing companies, Mr. Winterstern arrived two years ago, aiming to remake a tiny distributor… By last Friday he was gone, done in by a disastrous 2006 at the box office and a taste for spending.”

Captain America is dead. The legendary superhero is shot to death outside a courtroom in the latest issue of his comic, as part of a larger storyline about a government ban on superhero vigilantism. The hero’s adventures have been published by Marvel Comics since 1941.

The cellist was in A Russian facility and “underwent a complex operation on the liver, and now [doctors] have prescribed therapeutic exercise and walks in the fresh air.”

“The Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents has appointed A. Sprightley Ryan as permanent inspector general. Ryan, the acting inspector general since June 2006, recently released two reports on executive salaries at the Smithsonian and an audit of expenses of Secretary Lawrence M. Small.”