Category: people

“John Myatt is an artist. He is not, he is the first to admit, the world’s finest artist. He is, however, quite possibly the world’s finest forger. What he is doing, now, for up to £5,000 a painting, is forging to order, entirely legitimately: his ‘genuine fakes’ are stamped as such on the obverse, and his perfect (if Dulux) versions of, say, Giacometti’s Seated Nude, or Matisse’s The Pink Room, now grace ski lodges in Aspen and villas in Tuscany. It’s all great fun, and above board: it wasn’t always so.”

“Retired New York Times Hollywood correspondent Bernie Weinraub this week won the NYC Stellar Network’s competition, 2006 PLAYS IN PROGRESS, an opportunity for emerging playwrights to gain exposure among top theater industry professionals.”

The top executive at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts is resigning to lead an arts festival in her native Toronto. Janice Price has led the Kimmel since 2002, the year the center opened.

Charles Michener mourns Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. “On Monday, July 3, the most luminous voice I’ve ever heard was extinguished when the American mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died at the age of 52. Everything this astonishing woman did was almost too much to bear. As with Maria Callas, whom she matched in eruptive intensity, Hunt Lieberson’s performances took you so deeply into what she was singing about that the experience verged on voyeurism.”

“There are potentially disturbing implications in the rehiring by the London Royal Opera House of American soprano Deborah Voigt after she lost 135 pounds. If major opera companies are going to start requiring their stars to be svelte – well, 135 pounds closer to svelte – this could kill one of the last stages where artists don’t have to apologize for not being a size 2.”

Soprano Deborah Voigt has been hired to sing at London’s Royal Opera House. Voigt was famously fired from singing in Ariadne Auf Naxos in 2004, reportedl for being too fat. Subsequently she had surgery and lost 150 pounds.

Luciano Pavarotti is resting comfortably following successful cancer surgery in New York. “The 70-year-old singer was preparing to leave New York last week to resume his farewell world concert tour in Britain when doctors discovered a malignant pancreatic mass.” Doctors were reportedly able to remove the entire mass during the procedure, but pancreatic cancer has one of the highest eventual fatality rates among cancers. Pavarotti plans to resume touring in 2007.

“James Levine does look thinner, healthier, and the best part of all, there’s no change in his magical right baton-waving hand. And so he proved it last night at Tanglewood, conducting a little eerily for this listener the same program that he was leading when he took a header and crashed into rotator cuff surgery on March 1. That would be the Schoenberg first chamber symphony, and the glorious Beethoven ninth. He’s certainly lost a bunch of pounds, but James Levine has lost none of his humane gravitas.”

There was never really any risk that James Levine’s rotator cuff injury would affect his conducting skill, of course, but it may be a sign of how important Levine’s presence has been to the revival of the BSO that his return to the podium has inspired such breathless anticipation. “Conducting is a mysterious occupation, one in which the exchange of information seems to occur almost by osmosis. Everyone should be heartened by what happened at Tanglewood on Friday night. No one should worry about Mr. Levine’s arm-waving capacities, nor should they ever have. It is not like losing one’s fastball.”

“The previously unknown print was discovered in archives in the southern German town of Altötting, local authorities said yesterday, and has been authenticated as including Mrs Mozart. The long-lost photograph was taken in October 1840, when Constanze Weber was 78, at Max Keller’s home. The Altötting state archive said it was believed this was the only time in her life that she had been photographed.”