Category: people

Classical music aficionados have long bemoaned the lack of a modern version of Leonard Bernstein, a musical ambassador capable of producing top-quality concerts that are also attractive to mass audiences. But the truth is, San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas has been laying claim to the Bernstein legacy for years. His latest brainchild – a 5-year, $23 million multimedia project designed to bring symphonic music back into the forefront of the public mind – is already rolling, and MTT is taking a very hands-on role to ensure its success.

“In 2002, Mr. Thomson gave the Art gallery of Ontario $50-million to initiate the transformation of the facility plus $20-million to endow future operations. Alongside the donation, Mr. Thomson gave the gallery more than 2,000 pieces of art, including works by the Group of Seven and the Peter Paul Rubens masterpiece The Massacre of the Innocents. The value of that collection has been estimated at $300-million (U.S.) and has been described as the finest private art collection in Canada.”

Journalist Oriana Fallaci is on trial in Italy for things she wrote in her recent book. “She has been charged with violating a law that forbids defamatory statements about a religion acknowledged by the Italian state. The offence is punishable with a fine of up to €6,000 (£4,100).”

The composer was one of the most innovative of the 20th Century. “As a man who grew up in Hungary under German and Soviet tyrannies, when home was exactly where you did not want to be, who moved to Western Europe after the Russians extinguished Hungarian independence, and who had been footloose ever since, Mr. Ligeti had no simple notion of where he belonged, and this feeling informed his work.”

“Because one never knew quite what to expect before hearing a new Ligeti work, his music sometimes startled listeners. Yet this eclecticism allowed him to escape some paradoxical aesthetic traps that were endemic to late 20th-century composition. He insisted that his music was ‘neither tonal nor atonal’ and while he never blithely reiterated the musical language of the past, neither did he strive to be modern or avant-garde at the expense of communication with an audience.”

“The media mogul had been the lead donor to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s current expansion campaign, having helped launch the project in 2002 by donating his much-lauded $300-million private art collection to the AGO as well as $50 million towards the renovation campaign and $20 million towards the gallery’s endowment fund.”

“He was known for his avant garde compositions, including the 1962 piece Poeme Symphonique, which is played on 100 metronomes. His most famous works are those used in the Stanley Kubrick film, including Atmospheres and Lux Aeterna.”

Fifteen years is a long time for a conductor to stay with a single orchestra, so it’s not surprising that, as Daniel Barenboim prepares for his final sendoff as music director of the Chicago Symphony this week, the assessments of his tenure are not universally positive. But John von Rhein says that, on balance, Barenboim has been good for the CSO: “Like all marriages, that of Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony survived honeymoon, discord, absences, misunderstandings, threats of divorce and shared successes. Both used the other for their own benefit. Both traveled an enormous learning curve together.”

The CSO may have benefitted from Daniel Barenboim’s celebrity, says Alan Artner, but it certainly didn’t benefit from his self-important conducting style. “The emotional blockage, vainglory and shallowness of interpretation I heard at the beginning I still hear; only now, it’s no longer offset by the promise of natural ability and aptitude… In place of audible conviction, we have gotten testimonials.”

The federal government is investigating Cuban-American filmmaker Luis Moro for possible violation of the U.S. ban on travel to Cuba. Moro isn’t exactly denying the charge – he traveled to Cuba and made a film there as a direct challenge to the ban, which he believes to be unnecessary and punitive. Moro’s film, Love & Suicide, has been screening at various U.S. film festivals this season.