People

“He was a very strong face for the Charlotte Symphony, but he worked his butt off behind the scenes with the power players in Charlotte. He got people to realize that this was something important to put money into because it was good for the city.” – Charlotte Observer

“[The dissident artist] said he initially chose Germany after leaving China as it had worked so hard for his freedom, but now felt that Germany had changed and he was once again an exile. ‘Today, due to the political conditions in China, I have again been forced out,’ he said, accusing Europe of pandering to Beijing on human rights so as to win more business.” – Thomson Reuters

“Julien really wanted to connect with something else. He really wanted to connect with nature, but not only with nature, but with the scientists and the people that actually are studying the world today.” – CBC

“When Franklin died, at age 76, her family believed she had no will. Under Michigan law, that meant her estate would be divided equally among her sons. … But Franklin’s case is especially complex because determining how she wanted her assets distributed involves deciphering whether any of the three hand-scrawled documents found in her home three months ago — one of them under the couch cushions — should be embraced as her will.” – The New York Times

Feinstein has been unique in advocating for this music not only onstage and via albums but also through his books, PBS specials and NPR broadcasts, plus his Great American Songbook Foundation and eponymous cabarets and, of late, his work as principal pops conductor for the Pasadena Symphony. – Chicago Tribune

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a film-noirish comedy, was the first Hollywood film to show live actors and animated characters interacting in ways that looked seamlessly real. … Mr. Williams received a special Oscar for animation direction and for creating new characters for the film, which featured many well-established cartoon characters, and shared a visual effects Oscar.” – The New York Times

He’s led the sort of life that generates fascinating stories, which is perhaps what makes his much-anticipated memoir, “Possibilities,” such an occasionally frustrating read. – Los Angeles Times

Kunihiko Hashimoto, then a 26-year-old insurance worker, attended a New York Philharmonic concert in Tokyo in 1979, and he went backstage afterward to meet Bernstein, soon to turn 61. They fell in love, and though Lenny was never one for monogamy, letters in Library of Congress archives show that they remained involved for the rest of Bernstein’s life. And the relationship became professional as well as personal. – The Observer (UK)

“His inventions and scientific theories, as well as his painstaking painting technique, were all of a piece: science and art were not separate modes of thinking. His investigations into geology and botany were not digressions but crucial to understand universal principles that he incorporated in his paintings. Multidisciplinary and boundlessly inquisitive, Leonardo used all that he learned to create sublime art that still captivates.” – Clyde Fitch Report

Marshall, the child of immigrants from Barbados, wrote novels and short stories that connected the US African American community and the communities of the Caribbean – and influenced many writers who came after her, including Angela Flouroy, author of The Turner House. – The New York Times

Barnes served as a studio musician and producer for some of the most popular acts of the 1990s, including Roberta Flack, Sting, and Chaka Khan – and she propelled SNL to early viral fame on YouTube with her music for the song (whose title The New York Times will not print) “Dick in a Box.” – The New York Times

“I think that to him, in his head, he was just a big star and everyone wanted him. And to the rest of us he was just, you know, this creepy guy that could make or break your career.” – Los Angeles Times

“[He] dedicated a lifetime to writing and anthologizing poetry for children, amassing troves of verse” — 120 volumes by the time he died — “to help young people navigate the unknowns of life, from why stink bugs stink to how to survive a divorce.” – The Washington Post

Everyone had an opinion about what Kanye did. The VMAs were viewed by 11 million people that year, though the crush of coverage after the fact was more comparable to that of a Super Bowl, which typically gets 10 times as many viewers. – Washington Post

In Europe, there were no immediate cancellations of the 78-year-old Domingo’s performances and even some words of support for the star. Opera world officials noted that no charges had been brought against Domingo and no formal judicial investigations were underway that might provide legal underpinning to cancel any contractual obligations.The stark differences in the levels of urgency in the responses underline the differences in the footing of the #MeToo movement on both sides of the Atlantic. – Yahoo! (AP)

His movies earned 21 Oscar nominations over his four-decade career, and he garnered one himself for Best Picture for Costa-Gavras’s 1982 film Missing. But he’s best remembered for breaking the blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for Spartacus — and crediting him for it by name. – The Washington Post

“The allegations against Jamie Thomas, Indiana’s personal caretaker since 2013 and a longtime island associate, are included in a counterclaim by Indiana’s estate” in response to a complicated lawsuit by Thomas.” – Portland Press Herald

Manson had three primary lures: LSD, sex, and music. But music, and its power to unite a community of outsiders and misfits, remains the least-examined weapon in his arsenal. – The New Yorker

“A self-described ‘instinctive scholar,’ Takis” — né Panayiotis Vassilakis — “worked primarily in plaster and wrought iron before becoming fascinated by magnetism, electricity and sound — and how those unseen forces animate the physical world and how they might also breathe life into his artistic creations.” – The Washington Post

“While other budding jazz musicians of the 1940s were enamored of the daring bebop innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Mr. Wilber, … a clarinetist and saxophonist who was a protege of Sidney Bechet, one of the founding fathers of jazz, … looked toward the past for inspiration. He found it in the music of the 1920s.” – The Washington Post

He was chiefly renowned for his intimate personal and professional association with George Gershwin; after Gershwin’s early death in 1937, Levant virtually owned Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F. For a time, during the 1940s, he was the highest-paid concert pianist in the United States, spicing his performances with banter and self-lacerating quips. Assaying Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata, he might promise to play “with my customary arthritic abandon” and add: “This piece has never had a worthy interpretation. And it still won’t.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Mr. Bylsma’s 1979 recording of the Bach suites was widely credited with being the first performed on a period instrument using gut strings, which were typical of cellos of earlier eras. Pablo Casals’ historic recordings of these scores in the late 1930s, after long neglect, had brought them to wider attention. Today they are the most performed works for solo cello. – The New York Times

It seems there’s a moral spectrum in play: Scientists found that people would probably lie if they thought a big corporation, like say, Starbucks or Walmart, would foot the bill for the deceit. They told the truth if they felt like an individual proprietor of a business or a specific employee would have to pay for their dishonesty. – Mic

Phil Kennicott: “Death and remembrance, at least, come with the customs and norms that have been shredded in most of the rest of public life. If nothing else, death still inspires a pause in ordinary life and, in the case of artists, a respectful consideration of their habitually ignored accomplishments.” – Washington Post

Not David Marchese’s writing; he does a fine job. But Cage showed up for the interview wearing “oversize sunglasses, a dragon ring the size of a walnut and a black velveteen jacket over a Bruce Lee T-shirt.” He says that he has based various performances on his pet cobras, Woody Woodpecker, Stockhausen, and Pokey. (That’s Gumby’s sidekick, the orange horse.) He talks about his grail quest that was and was not metaphorical. (The Holy Grail, he has determined, is the Earth.) And he says about his acting, “I’m [now] at the top of my game.” – The New York Times Magazine

“The painter, known for his wry, carefully composed investigations into the nature of art making — say, analyzing every shade of paint used in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, then rendering those shades in abstraction — was also profoundly dedicated to his students as a professor of painting and drawing at UCLA, where he taught for more than three decades.” – Los Angeles Times

He began his career on conventional instruments and spent six years as the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s principal cellist before becoming one of the key artists of the European period-instrument movement in the 1970s and onward. Among his dozens of recordings as soloist and chamber musician, he’s most admired for two recordings of Bach’s Cello Suites, each considered revelatory in its time. – The Strad

“The first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, … Ms Morrison placed African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying as powerfully, or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after it ended.” – The Washington Post