Category: people

“David Murray, who turned 70 earlier this month, is retiring after 27 years as an eminent member of the Financial Times classical music reviewing team. Throughout his long career he has been a particular champion of new music and emerging talents.”

Famed tenor Placido Domingo has announced that he will take on a prominent baritone role in a new production of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra to be mounted in Berlin, London, and Milan. Domingo last performed as a baritone in 1959, and says that he may retire after his next attempt.

Speak the name Robert Moses in New York, and you’ll likely get an angry rant about the damage done to the city and its residents in the name of “urban renewal.” But there was far more to Moses’ legacy: he gave the city Lincoln Center and Jones Beach, and changed the landscape in several important ways. “With the city on the brink of a building boom unparalleled since Moses’ heyday, [some] scholars argue that his legacy is more relevant than ever.”

“This year, Lincoln Kirstein, a man who spent most of his life behind the scenes, will finally get his time in the spotlight. Few individuals have had a greater influence on the arts in New York City — and therefore in the country as a whole — than Kirstein (1907-1996). Yet Kirstein, whose centennial is being celebrated this year, is hardly a household name.”

“Antonina Tumkovsky, an influential teacher at the School of American Ballet who trained future stars of the New York City Ballet and other dancers for 54 years, died on Friday at the Tolstoy Foundation Nursing Home in Valley Cottage, N.Y., where she lived.”

“Robert Noortman, a gregarious, risk-taking dealer who was a major force in the market for old master and French Impressionist paintings, died on Sunday at his castle in the Belgian countryside, just over the border from his base in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He was 60.”

Ian McEwan, who grew up to be one of Britain’s premier authors, a winner of the prestigious Booker Prize who received a Commander of the British Empire honor from Queen Elizabeth II in 2000 recently discovered he has a brother. “For many years, McEwan and his lost brother, a bricklayer named David Sharp, each lived near Oxford without knowing the other existed, according to the Oxford Mail, the newspaper that first reported the story.”

“Of all the musicians forged by the golden age of jazz in Detroit in the mid-20th Century, Alice Coltrane, who died Friday in a suburban Los Angeles hospital of respiratory failure at age 69, traveled the farthest from her roots. It was a remarkable journey.”

“Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, a renowned and popular botanical artist whose subjects ranged from the flowers found in Shakespeare to the weeds found in New York City, died Thursday in Boulder, Colo.”

Plans are being made for an Elvis-style mausoleum and museum for James Brown’s former home. “Discussions about the Beech Island, S.C., location are being held by Brown’s children, close friends and the singer’s trustee.”