Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The Lives They Led

This past Sunday, the NY Times Magazine printed its annual issue of tributes to the famous, infamous, and obscure-but-you-should-know-them who died in 2010. On the Times web site, there's also a musical tribute, in a video called "The Music They Made," to musicians who died in 2010.

I'm sorry to say that the Times's definition of "musician" doesn't extend to people in the notational music tradition. So don't play that video expecting to hear Joan Sutherland, Shirley Verrett, Hugues Cuenod, Cesare Siepi, Giuseppe Taddei, Earl Wild, Charles Mackerras, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Philip Langridge, or any of the great classical performers who died this year. The Times should be ashamed of itself.

5 comments:

A.C. Douglas said...

Why am I not surprised. That's what one should expect when a hard-news man is running the arts section of a newspaper.

ACD

Anonymous said...

Benjamin Lees?

Or, if foreigners are accepted (I'm not sure if they were), Henryk Gorecki and Boris Tishchenko.

Instead, the closest we got was Lena Horne. Oh well.

Unknown said...

And composers I've found marvelous: Ann Southam, Art Jarvinen, Margriet Hoenderdos, Dennis Murphy, James Drew, and Jacques Hétu. Plus David Fanshawe, Arne Nordheim and of course Yvonne Loriod.

Unknown said...

Rudolf Barshai...

Lisa Hirsch said...

All of those, indeed.

ACD, this was in the magazine - not clear to what extent the Arts guy was consulted or what influence he had.