Category: people

JK Rowling nearly missed a flight back to London when airport security wanted her to check her in-progress manuscript for the new (and last) Harry Potter. “A large part of it is handwritten and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the US. They let me take it on thankfully, bound up in elastic bands.”

That’s Claus Peter Flor. “With his wildly animated face, enormous mane of salt-and-pepper hair and plummy German accent, the 53-year-old conductor would be Central Casting’s idea of a crazy professor. But his podium antics are musically functional: They achieve a gut-gripping intensity and a vividness of characterization, color and texture all but unparalleled among living conductors.”

“One of Boston Ballet’s newest talents, who had moved to the city only a month ago, was shot in the stomach over the weekend, struck by an apparently stray bullet in a spray of gunfire in the city’s Theater District.”

“A British artist is facing up to three years in prison after he was arrested yesterday and charged with insulting the Turkish prime minister’s dignity outside an Istanbul courthouse where he was protesting against another freedom of speech trial.”

“Acclaimed Chinese director Lou Ye, whose new film, ‘Summer Palace,’ is set partly during the Tiananmen Square student uprising, said he plans to continue working in China despite a five-year ban imposed on him by government officials. He said he will try to work in and around the system and find alternative ways to get his work distributed, such as on DVDs. Or he may focus on screenwriting.”

Nancy Roche, a longtime board member at Baltimore’s Center Stage, where she once served as interim managing director, died Friday of breast cancer. “She worked as consultant in governance for National Arts Strategies and was a founding member of the National Council for the American Theatre and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s trustees program. She co-edited ‘The Art of Governance,’ a guide to trustee leadership in the performing arts published in 2005.”

“He imagined himself a war correspondent on a battlefield, writing about costumed soldiers that bled emotions on a stage. But the struggle that Herbert Whittaker documented and supported for almost half a decade was a real one. As The Globe and Mail’s emeritus drama critic until 1975, Mr. Whittaker found himself on the front lines of the creation of a distinct Canadian theatre.”

“Norman Kelley, a tenor who sang with the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and many other companies around the world, died last Monday in Rockland, Mass. … He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1957 as Mime in the ‘Ring’ cycle, but his longest-lasting legacy at that house may have been his English translation of Humperdinck’s ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ first performed in 1967 and used for decades thereafter.”

Margaret Atwood’s latest book is like nothing the famed novelist has produced before: a loosely connected story arc tying together a collection of “stories about people who might well be thinly disguised versions of Atwood’s parents, sister, husband and various other friends and acquaintances that have passed through her life.” Still, Atwood is insistent that there is no autobiography here. “It’s not that the things in the stories didn’t happen. A lot of them did. They didn’t necessarily happen in that order. And there are a lot of glaring omissions.”

Sir Charles Mackerras conducted Beethoven’s 9th at the Edinburgh Festival last week, unaware that his daughter, Fiona, had died hours earlier from cancer. The news of her death was apparently withheld from Mackerras until after the concert was completed.