Category: people

“Of the many words written about Mehta over the years, ‘subtle’ has rarely been one of them. His nearly five-decade professional career has propelled him from a musical home in Mumbai (then called Bombay) through a prestigious apprenticeship in Vienna to the head of the most demanding orchestras on three continents. Along the path from prodigy to graying star he has emerged as perhaps the most dashing personality in the ostensibly staid world of classical music, the embodiment of a quickening cultural globalization that he has harnessed often in service of his beliefs, artistic and otherwise.”

“Anthropologists said they have pieced together Leonardo da Vinci’s left index fingerprint– a discovery that could help provide information on such matters as the food the artist ate and whether his mother was of Arabic origin… The research was based on photographs of about 200 fingerprints — most of them partial– taken from about 52 papers handled by da Vinci in his life.”

Composer Tan Dun chats about his life, including his student years, when he played the violin on a Greenwich Village street corner to make money: “It was West Fourth Street. That time it was very good. In an hour I can make maybe $30. Amazing. I still see those people who used to share the spot with me. ‘Hey, Tan, where are you playing?’ I say, ‘I play at Lincoln Center, but inside.’ “

An international scam attempting to prey on AIDS victims with hopes for a cure was foiled this week when the film actor the scammers had hoped would endorse their product instead smelled a rat and turned them in to the BBC. “The project planned to inject 40 AIDS victims with the serum and depriving them of anti-retroviral drugs.”

“Lawrence Ferlinghetti will have to bust out his old beret next week as the San Francisco poet is being awarded one of France’s top cultural honors: Commandeur des Arts et Lettres.”

“When Catherine Hewgill suddenly found her legs slipping from under her in the car park of the Sydney Opera House, her instinctive reaction was to protect her 300-year-old cello.” She succeeded in that, but the principal cellist of the Sydney Symphony shattered something even more precious to a musician in the fall – her wrist. Doctors were convinced that her career was over. Fortunately, they never shared those convictions with Hewgill.

“The Italian painter Emilio Vedova, who has died aged 87, was a veteran of one of the 20th century’s most bitter artistic conflicts – the ‘battle of styles’ in the 1950s between the neo-realists and the pioneers of expressive abstraction.”

Riding to Washington on the wave of the Democrats’ midterm-election comeback is one John Hall of New York, member of the light-rock group Orleans and co-writer of the band’s hits, “Still the One” and “Dance With Me.” “Once we forgive Hall for penning such excruciatingly unshakable couplets as ‘You’re still the one who can scratch my itch / You’re still the one and I wouldn’t switch,’ let us acknowledge his singular place in American history: He is the first professional rock musician elected to Congress.”

“Bebe Moore Campbell, a best-selling novelist known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races, died yesterday at her home in Los Angeles.”

The classic opera diva is not very much in evidence these days, but one woman is still very much upholding the grand tradition of Soprano As Center Of The Universe: Renee Fleming. “First and foremost her own voice has settled into a place where its opulence and bloom and sheer seductiveness can thrive – namely in the hothouse of late romanticism… Her critics will tell you that she is mannered, that she indulges style at the expense of sense, and sound at the expense of words. There are elements of truth in all of this. But would such accusations of self-indulgence have been levelled at her ‘golden age’ predecessors? Not on your life.”