Category: people

Soprano Dawn Upshaw has been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and has withdrawn from all of her engagements through the end of the year.

“S. Lane Faison Jr., an art historian who cut his teeth cataloging Hitler’s collection of plundered paintings, then, as a Williams College professor, inspired students who went on to head many of America’s leading art institutions, died on Saturday at his home in Williamstown, Mass. … A typical disciple was Glenn D. Lowry, a pre-med student in the early 1970’s whose main interest was skiing but who tagged along on an impromptu tour Mr. Faison happened to give of Williams’s highly respected art museum.”

Tobias Meyer and Christopher Burge are the chief auctioneers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, respectively. “Meyer, who is also Sotheby’s worldwide head of contemporary art, is German, in his early 40s, and looks like a Helmut Lang model. He is more of a celebrity outside of the auction world than Mr. Burge, having been the subject of a New Yorker profile, which described, among other things, his “sculptural” head, his Savile Row suits, and the dramatically designed apartment.”

“Bentley won early and intense fame with his 1946 book ‘The Playwright as Thinker,’ which made the study of drama intellectually respectable for the first time. He then published several other ambitious and penetrating books, including ‘Bernard Shaw’ (1947), ‘The Life of the Drama’ (1964) and three collections of theater criticism, that fixed his place in the tiny pantheon of permanently interesting drama critics.”

Caryl Churchill is “that paradox, a dramatist who deals with the most basic and timeless of issues while reacting as speedily as anyone to the urgent topics of the day, like cloning or, with Owners, the housing crisis of the early 1970s.”

Female Turkish orchestra musicians have been warned not to show any cleavage. “It is not appropriate for a musician’s cleavage to draw more attention than the instrument they are playing. This is a state institution. Women wear dresses that show the cleft in their cleavage, which is unsightly.”

“The modest tombstone, at a cemetery in the famed writers’ retreat of Peredelkino outside Moscow, was covered with soot after vandals put wreathes around it and set them on fire.”

Fred Child will stay on as host of the nationally syndicated Performance Today when production of the daily program of live classical performance shifts from Washington, D.C. to St. Paul, Minnesota this winter. NPR announced plans to dump the show earlier this year, as the network has chosen to focus mainly on news/talk programming, but the national distribution arm of Minnesota Public Radio agreed to pick up PT with no interruption in the show’s run.

Kiki Smith is an art-world fixture. “The hardest thing is to get past your taste — past your own formulaic way of doing things. Otherwise you’re stopped by what you know, which is limited. Chance is what a lot of artists use. In my case, I’ll arrange ways for things to be unpredictable.”

Daniel Cariaga was a music critic for the LA Times for 34 years. “Criticism can be a profession for the insecure. But Danny was more secure than any critic I have ever known. He was not a moth attracted to the flame. For all his years at The Times, he held the No. 2 position and didn’t apply for the top slot when it opened. As a musician, he trained as an accompanist. I view this as a result of a higher calling than that of stoking the ego. He put music first. In his early years, he told me, he could only write if he put his typewriter on the piano.”