Category: people

“Adam Guettel craves control. Journalists arriving for interviews without tape recorders have even known the composer-lyricist to proffer his own digital device. ‘I turn it on and say, “I’m going to e-mail this to you, and this is what you’re going to make your interview based on,” ‘ Guettel explains crisply.” The two Tony Awards he won for “The Light in the Piazza” have given Guettel, the 41-year-old grandson of Richard Rodgers, a measure of control over his career.

“Can it be that Thom Mayne, the architect of confrontation, has gone soft? His acclaimed design for Paris’s tallest office building, chosen on Dec. 1, is an elegant silhouette draped in a diaphanous skin, a far cry from the sharp corners, violent eruptions and fragmented forms that led some to call him the architect of dislocation. … He said: ‘Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That’s the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do. At the same time, do I listen? My clients would tell you I’m a farm boy from Tipton, Ind.’ “

In the new year, James Wood takes over running the Getty. “In hiring him, the Getty has put itself in the hands of an old-school museum man, one known for turning the Art Institute of Chicago around, for hiring shrewdly and for building consensus rather than racing ahead of the crowd.”

Harper Collins fired editor Judith Regan, but now Regan is fighting back, “hiring well-known Hollywood litigator Bert Fields. ‘They’ve chosen war and they will get exactly that. She won’t take this lying down’.”

When Alexandra Ansanelli left New York City Ballet for the uncertain stages of Europe this year, the challenge facing her was daunting: to go from being celebrated as one of the ballet world’s premiere “Balanchine-style” dancers to becoming a master of the classic ballet form. Many supposed that the transition would prove impossible. But early reviews (including some from the notoriously tough London press) indicate that Ansanelli may be more versatile than anyone knew.

Judith Regan, the powerful editor at the center of the recent firestorm over O.J. Simpson’s pseudo-confessional book, has been fired from HarperCollins. “Ms. Regan’s publishing unit and its staff [will] continue as part of the HarperCollins General Books Group, but it is unknown whether that group would remain in Los Angeles, where Ms. Regan moved it from New York earlier this year.”

“Next week Tan Dun will be the first composer in more than 60 years to conduct his own opera at New York’s Met. Ten years in the making, it’s a hugely ambitious project for all involved,” and will be the most expensive production the Met has ever mounted. Ultimately, Tan “is stretching for a new musical form that is neither oriental, nor western, nor, crucially, a fusion of the two.”

Lawrence Brownlee is not a likely opera star. “With a sound and technique made for the music of Handel and bel canto composers such as Rossini and Donizetti, he’s on his way to a breakthrough as the first internationally feted African-American coloratura tenor. While opera houses still crave Peruvian Juan Diego Flórez, the current king of that repertoire, Brownlee is emerging as a major competitor.”

An American college professor has been sentenced for stealing items from the Glenn Gould archive. “Accused of stealing thousands of dollars worth of items from the collection — after having had access to it for research purposes during the late 1980s — Moore was acquitted in October of all felony charges in the case. However, she was found guilty of two misdemeanour counts of criminal possession of stolen property.”