Category: people

The conductor reflects on his career and the future. “The thing of which I’m most proud is the American composers of my generation that we’ve been able to work with on an ongoing and regular basis,” he says. He singles out three in particular: Christopher Theofanidis, Jennifer Higdon, and Osvaldo Golijov. “It’s great to have an American composer of about 40 years old being mobbed in the lobby — and not because people are upset but because they loved it, which happens to Jennifer.”

Mavor Moore was “a true renaissance man — a gifted writer and performer, inspired cultural visionary and genuine friend to artists everywhere. He had an important sense of history, having been active in the arts in the difficult days before the creation of the Canada Council when the establishment of professional theatre, dance and music organizations posed a huge challenge and the principle of public funding of the arts was no more than a dream of the Massey Royal Commission. And he remained conscious through his working life of the infinite possibilities of Canadian cultural expression, provided it could be unleashed.”

“In a career at CBS that spanned his early days as a researcher for the radio division in the 1930s until his retirement as president of CBS Inc. in 1973, Stanton won five Peabody Awards for distinguished achievement and public service in broadcasting and made several lasting contributions to the industry.”

“Is she truly trying to live up to her sobriquet as ‘the Russian Maria Callas’ by taking on two of the major bel canto roles associated with her predecessor? Can her voice really be as fantastic as the worshipful reviews that have described it as “dark gold on red velvet’, ‘miraculous,’ ‘lustrous’ — fantastic enough to justify the debut of her latest CD, ‘Russian Album’ at No. 8 on the German pop charts?”

Critic Robert Hughes has “never made any secret of his snobbery, in the cultural if not the social sense: ‘I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness’.”

“Mr. Brown sold millions of records in a career that lasted half a century. In the 1960s and 1970s he regularly topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, although he never had a No. 1 pop hit. Yet his music proved far more durable and influential than countless chart-toppers. His funk provides the sophisticated rhythms that are the basis of hip-hop and a wide swath of current pop.”

He was one of Canada’s most important cultural forces. “The endlessly energetic and multitudinously talented author, director, actor, producer, lyricist and composer, who died in Victoria, B.C. on Monday at the age of 87, always believed a story told from a Canadian point of view automatically had something special going for it.”

Cultural icon Mavor Moore, the noted actor, writer, director, producer, critic and teacher who founded a host of Canadian artistic institutions, has died in Victoria.

The former violin prodigy built a distinguished musical career over 40 years as a founding member of the celebrated LaSalle Quartet, the first quartet-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. “He has students all over the world. The sincerity with which he taught, his passion for music and for life – he’s just an unforgettable human being,”

“A French appeals court acquitted a Swiss orchestra conductor Wednesday of charges of criminal involvement in a doomsday cult that lost scores of members in ritual killings in France, Switzerland and Canada. The court in Grenoble upheld Michel Tabachnik’s 2001 acquittal by a lower court.”