Category: people

Steve Reich is 70 this year, and settling into new digs outside of New York. “What do I want? I want people to love the music, not to feel, ‘What, him again?’ It seems that the music is holding up over time. That’s the most gratifying thing.”

The violinist Kennedy has always been flamboyant. “You only have to spend a short time in Kennedy’s company to realise that, for all his famed irreverence, he actually takes culture very seriously indeed. It’s those who approach the arts in a falsely reverential fashion who are the real philistines, he claims.”

“The man who co-wrote the song ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ had the unsettling experience this week of reading his own obituary — the result of an impostor who went through life claiming to be the author of the 1960s smash hit.”

Hans Stinmann, the controversial civic planner who some see as Berlin’s post-Wall savior, and others deride as a shortsighted pragmatist, is retiring at age 65 from his post as Berlin’s building director. “The projects he oversaw cover more than 741 acres in the post-Wall center of Berlin… Concerned that uncontrolled development would produce a forest of skyscrapers, Mr. Stimmann set building heights of 72 to 98 feet, or about six to eight stories tall.”

When Amy Schwarz Moretti, the young, talented concertmaster of the Oregon Symphony, announced that she was leaving the ensemble after only two years, it was a stunner, even to her close colleagues in the orchestra. But Moretti explains that her departure, which will see her become director and resident professor at a new music school in Georgia, will allow her more time to develop her career as a soloist and chamber musician. “You never know what life throws at you. This is a curveball I didn’t want to pass up.”

“I don’t think my voice has changed, but I am only hearing it from inside, so I can only speak about the sensation of singing. Every 20lbs I lost, I felt less rounded and less able to support the sound; well, that was because my support system was vanishing. At 150lbs heavier, you take a breath and those muscles are already engaged, you don’t have to think about it. Now, I have to think about it, about how things line up.”

“He made a starry reputation first as a satirist, writing a bracingly funny column for the Guardian in the early 1960s. His first novels, all five of them comedies, none of which sold well, won critical plaudits (The Russian Interpreter scooped the Hawthornden Prize in 1967), while his philosophy tome, Constructions, a series of 309 numbered thoughts (‘you can’t live in the present any more than you can live in the border between Kent and Sussex’), set him in territory occupied by the century’s greatest thinkers (Frayn read moral sciences at Cambridge).”

“Thomas Stewart, an American baritone who was renowned for his portrayals of Wotan, Amfortas and other central Wagnerian roles and who was heard frequently at Bayreuth and the Metropolitan Opera, died on Sunday in Rockville, Md.”

“Patrick Quinn, a former president of the Actors’ Equity Association who was about to become its first new executive director in 25 years, died yesterday at his country home in Bushkill, Pa. He was 56 and lived in Manhattan. … His tenure was to begin on Oct. 5. He would have succeeded Alan Eisenberg, who has held the position since 1981.”

“Mr. Jordan was a rare breed: an international conductor who spent the majority of his career conducting in his native Switzerland and in France. His best-known association was with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, based in Geneva, where he was music director for 12 years, from 1985 to 1997. He did not make his North American debut until 1985.”