The King Karl I of Romania Autograph Museum

Maria João Pires

2015-09-09T14:45:00.002+03:00

Maria João Pires (born in Lisbon, Portugal, 23 July 1944) is a Portuguese pianist.

Her first recital was at the age of five, and at the age of seven she was already playing Mozart piano concertos publicly. Two years later she received Portugal's top prize for young musicians. In the following years, she studied with Campos Coelho at the Lisbon Conservatory, taking courses in composition, theory, and history of music. She continued her studies in Germany, first in the Musikakademie of Munich with Rosl Schmidt and then in Hanover with Karl Engel.

International fame came in 1970, when she won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in Brussels. Subsequently she performed with major orchestras in Europe, America, Canada, Israel and Japan, interpreting works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin and other classical and romantic composers.

Her professionalism achieved worldwide recognition when a film (from 1999) was drawn to the attention of the press and went viral in 2013 - at the start of a lunchtime concert in Amsterdam she realised she had rehearsed for a different Mozart concerto from the one the orchestra had started playing; quickly recovering, she played the concerto from memory.

Pires performed at the BBC Proms in 2010. In an interview beforehand she said that after 60 years of recitals and concerts she had cut back her performances but was non-committal about retirement.

Pires performs as a solo artist and in chamber music: her many successful recordings include Moonlight, featuring Beethoven sonatas, Le Voyage Magnifique, the complete Impromptus of Schubert, Nocturnes and other works by Chopin, and Mozart Trios with Augustin Dumay (violin) and Jian Wang (cello).

She won the Pessoa Prize in 1989, and founded the Belgais Centre for Study of the Arts in 1999.

Gramophone selected her recordings of the Chopin nocturnes as the best version available: "I have no hesitation in declaring Maria João Pires – a pianist without a trace of narcissism – among the most eloquent master-musicians of our time" (Bryce Morrison).

One of her acclaimed recordings is "Mozart: The Piano Sonatas". According to the Penguin Guide: "Maria João Pires is a stylist and a fine Mozartian. She is always refined yet never wanting in classical feeling, and she has a vital imagination. She strikes an ideal balance between poise and expressive sensibility, conveying a sense of spontaneity in everything she does".

Elisabeth Leonskaja

2015-09-09T14:43:00.000+03:00

Elisabeth Leonskaja (b. November 23, 1945) is a distinguished Russian pianist and teacher. She was born to a Russian family living in Tbilisi, then the capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.

She gave her first concert at the age of eleven. In 1964 she began studies in the Moscow Conservatory. During her conservatory years she won prizes in the prestigious Enescu, Marguerite Long–Jacques Thibaud and Queen Elizabeth international piano competitions in Bucharest, Paris and Brussels.

She left the Soviet Union in 1978 and has since then lived in Vienna. A notable recording of hers is of Edvard Grieg's piano transcriptions of Mozart's piano sonatas K. 545 and K. 533/494, accompanied by Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she built a close friendship and collaboration. She recorded many years for Teldec, now for German label MDG and gives many Masterclasses.

Sir Simon Rattle

2015-09-03T20:44:00.001+03:00

Sir Simon Denis Rattle, OM CBE (born 19 January 1955), is an English conductor. He rose to international prominence during the 1980s and 1990s, while Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (1980-1998). He has been principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic since 2002, and plans to leave his position at the end of his current contract, in 2018. It was announced in March 2015 that Rattle would become Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra from September 2017.

Rattle was born in Liverpool, the son of Pauline Lila Violet (Greening) and Denis Guttridge Rattle, a Commander in the Royal Navy. He was educated at Liverpool College. Although Rattle studied piano and violin, his early work with orchestras was as a percussionist. He entered the Royal Academy of Music, University of London, in 1971. There, his teachers included John Carewe. In 1974, his graduation year, Rattle won the John Player International Conducting Competition.

After organising and conducting a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony whilst still at the Academy, he was talent-spotted by the music agent Martin Campbell-White, of Harold Holt Ltd (now Askonas Holt Ltd), who has since managed Rattle's career. He spent the academic year 1980/81 at St Anne's College, Oxford studying English Language and Literature. He had been attracted to the college by the reputation of Dorothy Bednarowska, Fellow and Tutor in English. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of St Anne's in 1991. He was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Music honoris causa of the University of Oxford in 1999.

In 1974, he was made assistant conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His first Prom at the Royal Albert Hall, conducting the London Sinfonietta, was, according to the BBC Proms Archive web-site, on 9 August 1976. The programme included Harrison Birtwistle's Meridian and Arnold Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony. In 1977 he became assistant conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.

His time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) from 1980 to 1998 drew him to the attention of critics and the public. In 1980, Simon Rattle became the CBSO's Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser, and in 1990, Music Director. Rattle increased both his profile and that of the orchestra over his tenure. One of his long-term concert projects was the series of concerts of 20th-century music titled "Towards the Millennium". One other major achievement during his time was the move of the CBSO from its former venue, Birmingham Town Hall, to a newly built concert hall, Symphony Hall, in 1991. The BBC commissioned film director Jaine Green to follow him in his final year with the CBSO to make Simon Rattle—Moving On.

Rattle was awarded a CBE in 1987 and made a Knight Bachelor in 1994. In 1992, Rattle was named a Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), along with Frans Brüggen. Rattle now has the title of Principal Artist with the OAE. In 2001, he conducted the OAE at Glyndebourne in their first production of Fidelio with a period-instrument orchestra.

Rattle strongly supported youth music. He led two attempts at gaining the record for the World's Largest Orchestra, both designed to raise awareness of youth music in schools. The first, in 1996, was unsuccessful. The second, in 1998, did succeed and the record held at nearly 4,000 musicians until it was broken in 2000 by a group in Vancouver.

In May 2006 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Arts. In 2011, the Royal Academy of Music presented him with an Honorary Doctorate. He was appointed Member of the Order of Merit (OM) in the 2014 New Year Honours.

Rattle conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at the Opening of the London Olympics 2012.

Rattle made his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic (BPO) in 1987, in a performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6. In 1999, Rattle was appointed as successor to Claudio Abbado as the orchestra's principal conductor. The appointment, decided on in a 23 June vote by the orchestra's members, was somewhat controversial, as several members of the orchestra were earlier reported to have preferred Daniel Barenboim for the post. Nevertheless, Rattle won the post and proceeded to win over his detractors by refusing to sign the contract until he had ensured that every member of the orchestra was paid fairly, and also that the orchestra would gain artistic independence from the Berlin Senate.

Before leaving for Germany and on his arrival, Rattle controversially attacked the British attitude to culture in general, and in particular the artists of the Britart movement, together with the state funding of culture in the UK.

Since his appointment, Rattle has reorganised the Berlin Philharmonic into a foundation, meaning its activities are more under the control of the members rather than politicians. He has also ensured that orchestra members' wages have increased quite dramatically, after falling over the previous few years.He gave his first concert as principal conductor of the BPO on 7 September 2002, leading performances of Thomas Adès' Asyla and Mahler's Symphony No. 5, performances which received rave reviews from the press worldwideand were recorded for CD and DVD release by EMI. Early collaborative projects in the Berlin community with Rattle and the BPO involved a choreographed performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and a film project with Mark-Anthony Turnage's Blood on the Floor. He has also continued to champion contemporary music in Berlin. The orchestra has established its first education department during Rattle's tenure.

Criticism of Rattle's tenure with the Berlin Philharmonic began to appear after their first season together, and continued in their second season. Rattle himself stated in 2005 that his relationship with the BPO musicians could sometimes be "turbulent", but also "never destructively so".

In 2006, a new controversy began in the German press as to the quality of Rattle's concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic, with criticism from the German critic Manuel Brug in Die Welt. One musician who wrote to the press to defend Rattle was the pianist Alfred Brendel. In 2007, the BPO/Rattle recording of Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem received the Classic FM Gramophone best choral disc award.

Rattle was originally contracted to lead the BPO through 2012, but in April 2008 the BPO musicians voted to extend his contract as chief conductor for an additional ten years past the next season, to 2018. In January 2013, he announced that he will not extend his contract beyond the 2018 season.

UNICEF appointed Rattle and the BPO as Goodwill Ambassadors in November 2007. He is a patron of the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

Rattle made his North American debut in 1976, conducting the London Schools Symphony Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl. He first conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic (LA Phil) in 1979 during the music directorship of Carlo Maria Giulini, and was their Principal Guest Conductor from 1981–1994. He also guest-conducted the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra. His New York City debut was with the LA Phil in 1985.

In 2000, Rattle was the Music Director of the esteemed Ojai Music Festival.

In 1993, Rattle made his conducting debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He returned for guest conducting engagements in 1999 and 2000. The musical relationship between Rattle and the Philadelphia Orchestra was reported to be such that Philadelphia wanted to hire Rattle as its next music director after Wolfgang Sawallisch, but Rattle declined. However, Rattle continues to guest-conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra, including appearances in 2006 and the Philadelphia Orchestra's first performances of Robert Schumann's cantata Das Paradies und die Peri in November 2007.

It was revealed and confirmed in March 2015 that Rattle had accepted the post of Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), a position which he will take up in September 2017.

Rattle has conducted a wide variety of music, including some with period instruments (either modern musical instruments whose design is similar to that of instruments commonly in use at the time the piece was composed or the actual historical instrument itself), but he is best known for his interpretations of late 19th- and early 20th-century composers such as Gustav Mahler, with a recording of Mahler's Second Symphony winning several awards on its release and being regarded by some music critics as Rattle's finest recording to date. He has also championed much contemporary music, an example of this being the 1996 TV series Leaving Home, where he presents a 7-part survey of musical styles and conductors with excerpts recorded by the CBSO.

His newest recordings with the Berlin Orchestra (as of 2006) have, on the whole, been favourably received, notably his recordings of the Dvořák tone poems, Mahler's Symphony No. 9 and Claude Debussy's La Mer. The Gramophone Magazine praised the latter as a "magnificent disc" and drew favourable comparisons with interpretations of the piece by Rattle's immediate predecessors, Claudio Abbado and Herbert von Karajan. He has also worked with the Toronto Children's Chorus. Rattle and the BPO also recorded Gustav Holst's The Planets (EMI), which was the BBC Music Magazine Orchestra Choice. In addition, Rattle's acclaimed complete 1989 recording of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess was used as the soundtrack for the equally acclaimed 1993 television production of the work. It was the first made-for-television production of Porgy and Bess ever presented. Rattle's 2007 recording of Johannes Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem received praise from BBC Music Magazine, as "Disc of the Month" for April 2007, "as probably the best new version of the Requiem I've heard in quite some years." Rattle and the BPO have also released recordings of Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony (Romantic), and Joseph Haydn's Symphonies Nos. 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 and Sinfonia Concertante.

Rattle's recording of Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem with the BPO received the Choral Performance Grammy Award in 2008. He has won two other Grammy Awards, one Choral Performance Award for a recording of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms in 2007, and another for Best Orchestral Performance for a recording of Mahler's unfinished Symphony No. 10 in 2000. The government of France made him a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 2010.

He was voted into the inaugural Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012.

Rattle's first marriage was to Elise Ross, an American soprano, with whom he had two sons: Sacha, who is a clarinettist, and Eliot, who is a painter. They were divorced in 1995 after 15 years of marriage. In 1996 he married his second wife, Candace Allen, a Boston-born writer. This second marriage ended in 2004, and in 2008 Rattle married the Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená. The couple have two sons, Jonas (2005) and Milos (2008), and a daughter Anežka (June 2014).

Rattle is a member of the Incorporated Society of Musicians and a fan of Liverpool Football Club.

Kristjan Järvi

2015-08-29T17:01:00.001+03:00

Kristjan Järvi (born 13 June 1972, Tallinn) is an Estonian-born American conductor. Järvi is the younger son of Neeme Järvi, and the brother of conductor Paavo Järvi and flutist Maarika Järvi.

When Järvi was age 7, his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Rumson, New Jersey. He grew up in New York City. Järvi studied piano with Nina Svetlanova at the Manhattan School of Music. He later went on to study conducting at the University of Michigan under Kenneth Kiesler.

From 1998 to 2000, Järvi was Assistant Conductor to Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He and the composer Gene Pritsker co-founded the Absolute Ensemble, based in New York City, in 1993, with Järvi as its music director. In 2007, Järvi and the Absolute Ensemble were awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize for Outstanding Artistic Achievement.

Järvi was Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Norrlands Opera Symphony Orchestra of Umeå in Sweden from 2000 to 2004. From 2004 to 2009, Järvi was Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Tonkünstler Orchestra, Vienna. Järvi is also the current Artistic Advisor to the Kammerorchester Basel and the conductor and founder of the Baltic Youth Philharmonic. In April 2011, Järvi was appointed the next chief conductor of the MDR Symphony Orchestra (MDR Sinfonieorchester) from the 2012-13 season on, with an initial contract of 3 years. Järvi renewed his contract in 2015.

In addition to a Grammy nomination, Järvi has previously been awarded the German Record Critics Prize and a Swedish Grammy for the recording of Hilding Rosenberg's opera "Isle of Bliss". He has recorded Leonard Bernstein's Mass with the Tonkünstler Orchestra and Absolute Ensemble. While Järvi's repertoire includes pieces from the Classic and Romantic periods, he is also a specialist for 20th-century composers and contemporary music, having commissioned works by Arvo Pärt, Heinz Karl Gruber, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Ezequiel Viñao, Peeter Vähi and Joe Zawinul, among others. In 2014 Järvi and French record label Naïve Classique launched the 'Kristjan Järvi Sound Project', an ongoing series featuring recordings from all of Järvi's ensembles.

Järvi's philanthropic activities include founding the Estonian Orphanage Music Outreach foundation and the Absolute Academy in Bremen.

Sarah Chang

2015-08-29T16:51:00.001+03:00

Sarah Chang (born Young Joo Chang, on December 10, 1980) is an American classical violinist. Recognized as a child prodigy, she first played as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1989. She enrolled at Juilliard School to study music, graduated in 1999, and continued university studies. Especially during the 1990s and 2000s, Chang had major roles as a soloist with many of the world's major orchestras.

Chang was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Voorhees Township, New Jersey. She is the daughter of Myoung-Jun, a composer, and Min-Soo Chang, who was a violinist and music teacher. Chang's parents moved to the United States from South Korea in 1979 for her father's advanced music degree at Temple University. Her mother took composition classes at the University of Pennsylvania. Chang has said that although she "never actually lived in Korea... I do still feel very strongly it's where my roots are." Her younger brother Michael (born 1987) has a degree from Princeton University.

In 1986, when Chang was 5 years old, she auditioned for and was accepted to the Juilliard School by performing the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor. Chang spent her weekends attending music classes at Juilliard and shopping in New York City with her parents. In 1989, she began working with Dorothy DeLay at her studio in New York where her father had received his musical lessons, and at the Aspen Music Festival and School. A former student and assistant to DeLay, Hyo Kang, also provided training to Chang. Following her 1999 high school graduation in New Jersey, she returned to Juilliard for university and studied with DeLay.

Chang learned from a family environment to naturally speak Korean. She is also fluent in German.

Due to her musical accomplishments, Chang is among a very small number of professional figures recognized as a child prodigy.

Her mother trained her to play one-finger melodies on the piano at age 3. For her fourth birthday, she was given a 1/16-sized violin. At age 8, she auditioned alongside Zubin Mehta and Riccardo Muti, who worked with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Both granted her immediate engagements.

In 1991, when Chang was 10 years old, she recorded her first album, Debut; it was released by EMI Classics on August 18, 1992 and quickly reached the Billboard chart of classical best-sellers. Chang quickly rose to fame and became known on an international scale, performing up to 150 concerts a year. At the age of 17, she asked for a three-month break; this opportunity did not come until she turned 20 years old. In 2006, Newsweek ranked her as one of the Top Eight Achieving Females in the United States. In the interview accompanying the feature, she commented: "I think having a career at such an early age kept me focused. We schedule at least two to three years in advance in the classical industry. I felt so grounded and so grateful to already know what it was that I wanted to do with my life."

In 2002, she performed in Pyongyang, North Korea. Chang commented: "The concert was full of government officials. Every single last seat. It was invitation only, but it was an unbelievable experience. Frightening and exhilarating at the same time. And I just thought about how lucky I am. I am so fortunate to be a musician, and at that moment, I genuinely felt that music is the one and only universal language."

Chang took part in watchmaker Movado's global advertising campaign "The Art of Time" with Pete Sampras and composer Wynton Marsalis. For the 2004 Olympics, she was selected to carry the Olympic Torch in New York. In 2005, Yale University dedicated a chair in Sprague Hall in Chang's name. Following this, Chang toured for a year with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in a Sextet programme of summer festivals leading to a concert at the Berlin Philharmonie.

Chang played a recital at Carnegie Hall on April 7 2007, accompanied by the British pianist Ashley Wass. She has continued to perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen and make appearances with the former at both the Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall throughout 2008. On March 27 and 28 2008 she played for San Antonio, Texas audiences at the Majestic Theater, a performance which was preceded by an appearance (to meet and inspire young as well as seasoned musicians at no charge) at Antonio Strad Violin in the same city. From May 2009 to June 2010, she held recital tours across Europe, North America and Asia with pianist Andrew von Oeyen; a July 2010 recording of the two was eventually released. In the February 12, 2010 program, she held her recital at the Barbican Hall in London. Chang made an appearance at the University of Southern California in March 2010, where she played Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26. She performed at the Hollywood Bowl in August 2010.

Chang plays the 1717 Guarneri del Gesù violin, which she received through the late Isaac Stern, and uses a variety of bows: she has said that she prefers a Pajeot for Mozart and Bach; a Sartory for the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos; and two Dominique Peccattes for other music.

Chang has performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Montréal Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, orchestras in London, England, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Additionally, she has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bayerische Rundfunk Orchestra, the Washington National Symphony Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Honolulu Symphony, and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra amongst others.

Chang has also been a soloist under the baton of conductors Mariss Jansons, Daniel Barenboim, Sir Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, Bernard Haitink, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, André Previn, Sir Simon Rattle, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Leonard Slatkin, Michael Tilson Thomas, Plácido Domingo, David Lockington, David Zinman, Gustavo Dudamel, Valery Gergiev, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jaap van Zweden, John Williams and others.

Notable recital engagements have included her Carnegie Hall debut and performances at the Kennedy Center, Orchestra Hall, Symphony Hall, Barbican Centre, Philharmonie, and Concertgebouw.

As a chamber musician, Chang has collaborated with Pinchas Zukerman, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yefim Bronfman, Martha Argerich, Leif Ove Andsnes, Stephen Kovacevich, Yo-Yo Ma, Lynn Harrell, Lars Vogt, and the late Isaac Stern. She has made several chamber recordings with current and former members of the Berlin Philharmonic, including the Sextet and Piano Quintet of Dvořák and the Souvenir de Florence of Tchaikovsky.

In January 2011, Sarah Chang was interviewed by Evan Solomon of Power & Politics (CBC) where it was revealed that she had been appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission on Russian Relations, and also was taking on a new role as State Department Special Cultural Envoy. Chang has already been promoting and supporting childhood musical education for many years. She has also been a cultural ambassador for the U.S.; for instance, she was invited to play in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, with a South Korean orchestra in 2002.

Kenneth Arrow

2015-08-13T21:58:00.002+03:00

Kenneth Joseph "Ken" Arrow (born August 23, 1921) is an American economist, writer, and political theorist. He is the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to have received this award, at 51.

In economics, he is a figure in post-World War II neo-classical economic theory. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves. His most significant works are his contributions to social choice theory, notably "Arrow's impossibility theorem", and his work on general equilibrium analysis. He has also provided foundational work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information.

Arrow remains active on the international scene through a variety of initiatives including trustee of Economists for Peace and Security and a member of the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the not-for-profit behind the Health Impact Fund.

Arrow was born on August 23, 1921, in New York City. Arrow's mother, Lilian, was from Iaşi (Romania), and his father, Harry, was from Podu Iloaiei (Iaşi, Romania).The Arrow family has Romanian Jewish origins.His family was very supportive of his education.Growing up during the Great Depression, he embraced socialism in his youth. He would later move away from socialism, but his views retained a left sensibility.

He graduated from Townsend Harris High School and then earned a Bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1940 in mathematics, where he was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon. He attended Columbia University, for his graduate studies. While there, he studied under Harold Hotelling, and was greatly influenced by him.He received a Master's degree in 1941. He served as a weather officer in the US Air Corps from 1942–1946.

From 1946 to 1949 he spent his time partly as a graduate student at Columbia and partly as a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago. During that time he also held the rank of Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. In 1951 he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia.

Arrow is brother to the economist Anita Summers, uncle to economist Larry Summers, and brother-in-law of the late economists Robert Summers and Paul Samuelson. In 1947, he married Selma Schweitzer; they have two children: David Michael and Andrew Seth,both actors. Andrew is married to actress Donna Lynne Champlin.

He is currently the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, Emeritus at Stanford University. He is also a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. He is also currently a member of the Science Board of Santa Fe Institute.

He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. He was a convening lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is also Editor of the Annual Review of Economics.

Five of his former students have gone on to become Nobel Prize winners. These include Eric Maskin, John Harsanyi, Michael Spence and Roger Myerson.

He served in the government on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers in the 1960s with Robert Solow. As a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, in 1995 he taught Economics at the University of Siena.

A collection of Arrow's papers is housed at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.He has an Erdős number of 3.

Grigory Sokolov

2015-08-13T21:54:00.002+03:00

Grigory Lipmanovich Sokolov (Russian: Григо́рий Ли́пманович Соколо́в; born April 18, 1950) is a Russian concert pianist.

Sokolov began studying the piano at the age of five and he entered the Leningrad Conservatory's special school for children at the age of seven to study with Leah Zelikhman. After graduating from the children's school he continued studying at the Conservatory with Moisey Khalfin. At 12, he gave his first major recital in Moscow, in a concert of works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Liszt, Debussy, and Shostakovich at the Philharmonic Society. At age 16, he came to international attention when the jury at the 1966 International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, headed by Emil Gilels, unanimously awarded him the Gold Medal. It seems this may have been a surprising result: "16-year old Grisha Sokolov who finally became the winner of that competition was not taken seriously by anyone at that time."

In fact, despite the international prestige of his Tchaikovsky Competition success, Sokolov's international career began to flourish only towards the end of the 1980s. It has been said that his not defecting and the limited travelling allowed under the Soviet Regime were to blame. This is contradicted by the fact that Sokolov gave US tours in 1969, 1971, 1975, and 1979, as well as numerous recitals elsewhere in the world such as Finland and Japan. "Sokolov's life as a touring soloist is quite overcrowded. He tours a great deal in both his motherland and abroad."

The 1980s seem to have proved something of a stumbling-block to Sokolov's career in the US. "In the beginning, I played a lot of single concerts in America, in 1969, '71 and, I think, 1975. After that there was a break in relationships between the U.S. and the Soviet Union--they were disconnected by the Afghanistan War. One tour in the U.S. was cancelled in 1980. Then all cultural agreements between the two countries were cancelled." In addition, during the breakup of the former Soviet Union, Sokolov played no concerts outside Russia. He is now a well-known figure in concert halls around Europe, but much less so in the U.S.Sokolov has released relatively few recordings to date and released none for a 20-year span from 1995 to 2015. But in 2014 he signed a contract with Deutsche Grammophon to release recordings of some of his live performances, and in 2015, he released a 2-CD live Salzburg recital featuring two sonatas by Mozart, Chopin's cycle of 24 Preludes, and encore pieces by Scriabin, Chopin, Rameau, and Bach.

In March 2009, it was reported that Sokolov cancelled a planned concert in London because of British visa requirements demanding that all non-EU workers provide fingerprints and eye prints with every visa application (he also cancelled his 2008 concert on seemingly similar grounds). Sokolov protested that such requirements had echoes of Soviet oppression.

When asked, Sokolov cited the following pianists as having inspired him in his years of studies: "Of those whom I heard on the stage I'd like to name first of all Emil Gilels. Judging by the records, it was Rachmaninoff, Sofronitsky, Glenn Gould, Solomon [and] Lipatti. As to esthetics, I feel most close to Anton Rubinstein."

Poul Ruders

2015-01-31T19:45:00.001+02:00

Poul Ruders (born 27 March 1949 in Ringsted) is a Danish composer.

Ruders trained as an organist, and studied orchestration with Karl Aage Rasmussen. Ruders's first compositions date from the mid-1960s. Ruders regards his own compositional development as a gradual one, with his true voice emerging with the chamber concerto, Four Compositions, of 1980. His notable students include Marc Mellits.

Writing about Ruders, the English critic Stephen Johnson states: "He can be gloriously, explosively extrovert one minute - withdrawn, haunted, intently inward-looking the next. Super-abundant high spirits alternate with pained, almost expressionistic lyricism; simplicity and directness with astringent irony."

Ruders has created a large body of music ranging from opera and orchestral works through chamber, vocal and solo music in a variety of styles, from the Vivaldi pastiche of his first violin concerto (1981) to the explosive modernism of Manhattan Abstraction (1982).

Other works include the operas Tycho (1986), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Proces Kafka/Kafka's Trial (2005), and Selma Ježková (2007, after Trier's ‘Dancer in the Dark’), five symphonies, four string quartets, Violin Concerto No. 1 (1981), Etude and Ricercare (1994) for guitar, for David Starobin, The Bells (songs) with Lucy Shelton, soprano, and theChristmas Gospel (1994) and two piano sonatas; Abysm (2000) for Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Ruders has written several works for the American guitarist and promoter of new music David Starobin: Psalmodies (1989) and Paganini Variations for guitar and orchestra (1999–2000), and Psalmodies Suite (1990), Etude and Ricercare(1994) and Chaconne (1996) for solo guitar. Ruders has composed a Concerto in Pieces (1995), which is a set of variations on the "Witches' Chorus" from Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas.

His fourth symphony, An organ symphony, (with a significant part for organ) was a joint international commission by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Odense Symphony Orchestra and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The world premiere took place in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas, Texas, 20 January 2011.

Evgeny Vodolazkin

2014-12-30T13:32:00.003+02:00

Evgeny Vodolazkin was born in Kiev in 1964. A scholarly expert in the old Russian literature, since 1990 Vodolazkin has worked in the department of the Old Russian Literature at the Pushkin House. Prof. Dmitry Likhachev’s pupil, Eugene Vodolazkin has numerous academic published titles and articles to his name and has been awarded fellowships for research and lectureship in Germany from Toepfer Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Vodolazkin’s debut novel, Solovyov and Larionov, became an immediate success, shortlisted to Andrei Bely Prize (2009) and Big Book Award (2010). His second novel Laurus was not only very popular with readers, but was also highly rewarded in 2013 with a place on the shortlist of the NOS and Russian Booker Prize, as well as the first place of The Big Book Prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Prize.

Leontina Vaduva

2014-12-23T21:16:00.004+02:00

Leontina Vaduva [Văduva] (born in Roșiile, on December 1, 1960) is an acclaimed Romanian soprano. She studied at the Bucharest Conservatory and with Ileana Cotrubaș, and debuted in the title role of Manon at Toulouse, in 1987.
A recipient of the Laurence Olivier Opera Award, she has often appeared at Covent Garden, in Rigoletto (opposite Ingvar Wixell and Jerry Hadley, 1989), Carmen (as Micaëla, 1991 and 1994), and Roméo et Juliette (1994).

In 2000, Vaduva appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, in six performances of La bohème (as Mimì, with Luis Lima). The soprano has also sung with the companies of Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Cologne, Vienna, and Paris.

Her discography includes Rigoletto (1993), Les contes d'Hoffmann (as Antonia, with Roberto Alagna, conducted by Kent Nagano, 1994-96), La bohème (again with Alagna, led by Sir Antonio Pappano, 1995), and an album of "Opera Arias," conducted by Plácido Domingo (1997). Especially noteworthy is her DVD of Roméo et Juliette, with Alagna, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras and directed by Nicolas Joël (1994).

André Rieu

2014-12-09T16:13:00.000+02:00

André Léon Marie Nicolas Rieu (born 1 October 1949) is a Dutch violinist and conductor best known for creating the waltz-playingJohann Strauss Orchestra. Rieu and the Johann Strauss Orchestra have turned classical and waltz music into a worldwide concert touring music act, as successful as some of the biggest global pop and rock music acts.

The name Rieu is of French Huguenot origin. He began studying violin at the age of five. His father, of the same name, was conductor of the Maastricht Symphony Orchestra. From a very young age he developed a fascination with orchestra. He studied violin at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège and at the Conservatorium Maastricht, (1968–1973). His teachers included Jo Juda and Herman Krebbers. From 1974 to 1977, he attended the Music Academy in Brussels, studying with André Gertler, finally receiving his degree "Premier Prix" from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.

At university he performed the Gold And Silver Waltz by Franz Lehár. Encouraged by the audience reaction he decided to pursue the waltz form. Rieu formed the Maastricht Salon Orchestra and performed as a violinist with the Limburg Symphony Orchestra. In 1987, he created the Johann Strauss Orchestra and his own production company. Since then, his melodramatic stage performances and rock-star demeanor have for some been associated with a revival of the waltz music category. André Rieu plays a 1667 Stradivarius violin.

In September 2007 Rieu performed in Australia for the first time solo, without his Orchestra at the Sandringham Hotel, in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Sandringham playing "My Way" and "Waltzing Matilda"—and the next day appeared at Sydney's Arena Cove, Warringah Mall Shopping Centre with the same set. In April 2009, he made a cameo appearance as himself on "Ramsay Street" in the long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours.

In April 2013 Rieu and his Johann Strauss Orchestra performed an open-air Coronation Concert in Amsterdam on the Museumplein.

In 2013, Rieu released a CD entitled "Music of the Night".

The Orchestra began in 1987 with 12 members and the first concert was given on 1 January 1988. It now performs with between 80 and 150 musicians. At the time the Orchestra first toured Europe, a renewed interest in waltz music emerged in the continent. The revival began in the Netherlands and was ignited by their recording of the Second Waltz from Shostakovich's Suite for Variety Orchestra. As a result, Rieu became known as the "Waltz King".

Rieu and his orchestra have performed throughout Europe, North and South America, and Japan. Winning a number of awards including two World Music Awards, their recordings have gone gold and platinum in many countries, including 8-times Platinum in the Netherlands.

He records both DVD and CD repertoire at his own recording studios in Maastricht in a wide range of classical music as well as popular and folk music, plus music from well-known soundtracks and musical theatre. His lively orchestral presentations, in tandem with marketing, have attracted worldwide audiences to this subgenre of classical music.

In recent years André Rieu and the Johann Strauss Orchestra have taken classical and waltz music on worldwide concert tours, the size and revenue of which are otherwise only seen from pop and rock music acts. In 2008 Rieu’s extravagant tour featured a full size reproduction of Empress Sisi’s Castle, the biggest stage ever to go on tour at that time. During the first half of 2009, André Rieu was the world’s most successful male touring artist, according to Billboard magazine.

One of the channels of the BSkyB group, Sky Arts 2 in the UK, was renamed as Sky Arts Rieu in his honour. Between 30 March and 14 April 2013 Sky Arts Rieu broadcast Rieu concerts and documentaries 24 hours per day.

Eamon Kelly, writing in The Australian newspaper, in an article that discusses the controversy that Rieu engenders, said: "He depicts his critics as members of a stuffy musical elite with narrow aesthetic tastes, yet regularly demeans in interviews music that is not to his taste and classical musicians who choose not to perform in his manner."

Of Rieu's popularity and the debate in the media over criticism of him, Eamon Kelly says: "It is disappointing to see professional journalists indulging in cheap, inaccurate stereotypes to dismiss criticism of Rieu." But he goes on to add: "Equally misguided are those who cursorily dismiss Rieu. Rieu's live and recorded performances have brought joy to millions of people. Few in his audiences are regular classical music attendees and it could be seen as promising that, via Rieu, they are listening to standards of the classical canon. The fact that Rieu's focus is on highly accessible, enjoyable repertoire is not an argument against his musical credentials."

Eamon Kelly further adds, after hearing the orchestra perform, that there is "no cause" for Rieu's boast his orchestra was "superior to the many other orchestras that specialise in ... Viennese and popular classical repertoire." Additionally, he found that in musical terms "the performance did not surpass playing standards in Australia's major symphony orchestras". He did add that the "oboist, Arthur Cordewener, provided the most impressive musical performance with a sublime introduction to an otherwise unremarkable performance of [Ravel's] Boléro."

David Templeton, writing in the magazine All Things Strings says:

Ironically, it is Rieu’s own success that has earned him a horse-drawn carriage full of criticism, a pot-shot laden backlash aimed chiefly at the calculated emotionalism and theatrical flourishes of his performances, which, according to many, only cheapen the classical-music experience. Classical radio stations avoid his music as they might avoid a leper in the mall, though—let’s just say it plain and clear—Rieu is a superb violinist.

Chris Boyd, a critic writing for Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper, finds that he could not give a general criticism of the playing of Rieu, as, except for "a clean and lyrical solo inWaltzing Matilda", his main stage function was apparently "blarney and delegation". However, Boyd also comments that the quality of the artists that Rieu works with is "extraordinary". Boyd assesses the low points of the concert as the "Three Tenors-style" rendition of "Nessun dorma" which he finds was an "abomination", while saying the concert's highlights included "a sugar-shock sweet rendition" of "O mio babbino caro" as well as Strauss's Emperor Waltz and Blue Danube, Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary and theBoléro.

André has been married to Marjorie Rieu (1951) since 1975 and they have two sons, Marc (1978) and Pierre (1981). Marjorie Rieu works with her husband full-time as production manager. She studied German and Italian, film science, French literature and writes children’s books. Apart from Dutch (including his native Limburgish) Rieu also speaks (in order of fluency) English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.

In April 2014, André sought advice from a Swiss osteopathic surgeon for complaints of severe neck pain, similar to a repetitive strain disorder.

President Klaus Werner Iohannis

2014-11-19T21:20:00.000+02:00

Klaus Werner Iohannis (spelled Johannis) (born 13 June 1959) is a Romanian politician. He was elected the fifth President of Romania on 16 November 2014. He became leader of the National Liberal Party in 2014, after having served as leader of the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania from 2002 to 2013. Iohannis was a physics teacher and a school inspector before pursuing a full-fledged political career.

Iohannis was first elected mayor of the city of Sibiu in 2000, representing the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania. Although the German population of the once predominantly German-speaking city of Sibiu has declined to a tiny minority, Iohannis won a surprise victory and was re-elected by landslides in 2004, 2008 and 2012. Iohannis is credited with turning his city into one of Romania's most popular tourist destinations, and the city was declared a European Capital of Culture in 2007. In February 2013, Iohannis became a member of the National Liberal Party, accepting an invitation from Liberal leader Crin Antonescu, and was immediately elected the party's First Vice President, becoming the party's President the following year.

In October 2009, four of the five political groups in the Parliament, excluding the Democrat Liberal Party of then-President Traian Băsescu, proposed him as a candidate for the office of Prime Minister of Romania; however, Băsescu refused to nominate him despite the Parliament's adoption of a declaration supporting his candidacy.^[1] He was again the candidate for Prime Minister of theNational Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party in the elections in the same year.^[2]

Iohannis is a Transylvanian Saxon, part of Romania's German minority which settled in Transylvania in the 12th century.

Born in a house in the historic centre of Sibiu to a Transylvanian Saxon family, Klaus Iohannis is the eldest child of Susanne and Gustav Heinz Johannis. He also has a sister, Krista Johannis.^[3] Both his parents as well as his sister emigrated from their nativeSibiu (German: Hermannstadt) to Würzburg in Germany in 1992, acquiring citizenship there under the German Law of Return,^[4]^[5]as did many other Transylvanian Saxons after the fall of the Iron Curtain. As of 2014, his parents, sister and a niece live in Würzburg.^[6] Iohannis has stated that his family settled in Transylvania in present-day Romania 850 years ago.^[7] Furthermore he did not follow his family to Germany because his wife wished to stay in Romania.^[8]

After graduating from the Faculty of Physics of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca in 1983, Iohannis worked as a high school physics teacher at various schools and colleges in Sibiu, including, from 1989 to 1997, the Samuel von BrukenthalGymnasium in Sibiu, the oldest German-speaking school in Romania. From 1997 to 1999, he was Deputy General School Inspector of Sibiu County, and from 1999 until his election as mayor in 2000, he was the General School Inspector, head of public schools in the county.

Iohannis is fluent in German and Romanian at a native level and also speaks English. The original spelling of his name (which is German) is Johannis, but the name was registered by a Romanian official as Iohannis on his birth certificate^[9] and he has used both spellings interchangeably.^[10] In 1989, he married ethnic Romanian Carmen Georgeta Lăzurca, an English teacher at theGheorghe Lazăr National College in Sibiu.^[11]^[12] They have no children.

Iohannis is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Augsburg Confession in Romania, the German-speaking Lutheran church in Transylvania.

He joined the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania in 1990, and served as a member of its board of education in Transylvania from 1997, and a member of the local party board in Sibiu from 1998. In 2001, he was elected President of the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania.

In 2000, the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania (FDGR) in Sibiu decided to back him as a candidate for mayor. Despite the fact that Sibiu's German minority had shrunken to a mere 1.6%, Iohannis was elected with 69.18% of the votes and has won three re-elections in a row, getting some of the largest electoral scores in the country: 88.7% of the vote in 2004, and 87.4% in 2008. He is the first ethnic German mayor of a Romanian city since Albert Dörr, who served from 1940 to 1945. The small German minority is popular in Romania, where they are often viewed as hard-working, precise and uncompromising. Many Romanians also remember that the country experienced some of its best moments under German kings over a century ago.^[5]

Throughout his tenure as mayor, he has worked to restore the town's infrastructure and to tighten the city administration. Iohannis is also widely credited with turning the city into one of Romania's most popular tourist destinations thanks to the extensive renovation of the old downtown.^[13] During his first term, Iohannis worked with a city council that had a social democrat majority.^{[citation needed]} Since 2004, during his second and third terms, his own party, FDGR, had the majority. Since 2008, FDGR has 14 out of 23 councilors,PDL has 4, PSD has 3, and PNL has 2.^[14]

Iohannis established contacts with foreign officials and investors. Sibiu was declared the European Capital of Culture of 2007, along with Luxembourg (the bearer of the distinction in 1995).^{[clarification needed]} Luxembourg chose to share this honourable status with Sibiu due to the fact that many of the Transylvanian Saxons emigrated in the 12th century to Transylvania from the area where Luxembourg is today.^[15] Sibiu, or Hermannstadt in German, was built by the Transylvanian Saxons, was for many centuries the cultural centre of that group, and was a predominantly German-speaking city until the mid 20th century. Many Germans left the city after World War II, and especially in 1990, within months of the fall of the Iron Curtain.

On November 4, 2005, Iohannis was nominated as the "Personality of the Year for a European Romania" (Personalitatea anului pentru o Românie europeană) by the Eurolink – House of Europe organization.

On October 14, 2009, the leaders of the opposition parliamentary groups (the National Liberal Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, and the group of smaller ethnic minorities), proposed Iohannis as a candidate for Prime Minister of Romania, after the government of Prime Minister Emil Boc fell a day before as a result of a motion of no confidence in the Parliament. Coming from outside the national-level politics of Romania, Iohannis has the image of an independent politician,^[16] although his party has consistently allied itself with, and Iohannis has campaigned in the latest European Parliament elections for the National Liberal Party. The National Liberal Party (PNL), the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR), and the group of small ethnic minorities in the Parliament subsumed Iohannis as their common candidate for Prime Minister of an interim government.^[17] On October 14, Klaus Iohannis confirmed acceptance of his candidacy. However, on October 15, the President Traian Băsescu nominated Lucian Croitoru, a top Romanian economist, as Prime Minister, and charged the latter with forming the country's next government.

After the second round of talks, a day before Croitoru's nomination, Băsescu noted: "Some parties have proposed Klaus Iohannis. I would like you to know that I have not rejected the possibility for him to become Prime Minister in the condition that my options would be directed towards other [national unity government] solutions. But I have rejected such a proposal because it comes from PSD or another party [PNL]", referring to his alleged constraint to consider a proposal of the largest party (PDL), constraint disputed by the other parties.^[18]^[19] The opposition criticized the President for not designating Iohannis. Social Democrat leader Mircea Geoană accused Băsescu of trying to influence the upcoming presidential elections by having them organized by a sympathetic government.^[20]^[21] Crin Antonescu, the leader of the National Liberals, vowed his party would derail other nominations but Iohannis'.^[20] After the nomination of Croitoru, Antonescu, a candidate in the presidential election, stated that he would nominate Iohannis as Prime Minister if elected President.^[22] Three days later, on October 18, Geoană suggested Antonescu was trying to use Iohannis as an "electoral agent" for Antonescu's bid for president. In response, Antonescu told the press that Iohannis "is not the type of person that would let himself being used".^[23] Geoană and PSD leadership has held a second meeting with Iohannis in Bucharest in the evening of October 18. UDMR, which the previous day announced it would also attend, declared in the morning that all their leaders are not in the city. PNL was present at the meeting by lower level representatives, after Antonescu announced in the morning he is on campaign in Cluj-Napoca.^[24] On October 21, the Parliament adopted with 252 votes for (of PSD, PNL, UDMR and minorities groups) and 2 against a declaration requesting the President to nominate Iohannis as Prime Minister.

On February 20, 2013, Klaus Iohannis joined the PNL, announcing this during a press conference with Crin Antonescu. At a PNL extraordinary congress, he was elected First Vice President of the Party. In the meeting of 28 June 2014, he was elected President of the PNL with 95% of the votes.

In 2009, Iohannis had stated that he might possibly run for the office of President of Romania, although not in 2009.^[27] Former Prime Minister Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu had said on October 27, 2009 and again on April 23, 2010 that he would like to see Iohannis become President of Romania.^[28]

PNL and PDL started in the summer of 2014 procedures to strengthen the political right. The two parties will eventually merge under the name PNL, but went for elections in an alliance: the Liberal Christian Alliance (Alianța Creștin-Liberală). On August 11, the alliance chose Iohannis as its candidate for the presidential election in November ^[29] and so he was registered as an official presidential candidate. He received 30.37% of the votes in the first round.

At the second round on November 16 he was elected President of Romania with 56% of the votes.

On November 16th, Klaus Iohannis was elected the fifth President of Romania, winning against the PSD candidate Victor-Viorel Ponta. Iohannis won the elections with 54.5% of the votes. He is due to take office on 22 December. His presidential campaign focused on fighting corruption and on improving the justice system.

He is due to take the office on December 22, 2014, when Traian Băsescu's term ends.

Chubby Checker

2014-11-11T10:30:00.002+02:00

Chubby Checker (born Ernest Evans, October 3, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. He is widely known for popularizing the twist dance style, with his 1960 hit cover of Hank Ballard's R&B hit "The Twist". In September 2008 "The Twist" topped Billboard'slist of the most popular singles to have appeared in the Hot 100 since its debut in 1958, an honor it maintained for an August 2013 update of the list. He also popularized the Limbo Rock and its trademark limbo dance, as well as various dance styles such as the fly.

Checker is the only recording artist to place five albums in the Top 12 all at once. The performer has often claimed to have personally changed the way we dance to the beat of music, as when he told Billboard, "Anyplace on the planet, when someone has a song that has a beat, they're on the floor dancing apart to the beat. And before Chubby Checker, it wasn't here." Clay Cole agreed: "Chubby Checker has never been properly acknowledged for one major contribution to pop culture—Chubby and the Twist got adults out and onto the dance floor for the very first time. Before the Twist dance phenomenon, grownups did not dance to teenage music."

Ernest Evans was born in Spring Gulley, South Carolina. He was raised in the projects of South Philadelphia, where he lived with his parents, Raymond and Mrs. Eartle Evans and two brothers. By age eight Evans formed a street-corner harmony group, and by the time he entered high school, took piano lessons at Settlement Music School. He would entertain his classmates by performing vocal impressions of popular entertainers of the day, such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Fats Domino. One of his classmates and friends at South Philadelphia High School was Fabiano Forte, who would become a popular performer of the late 1950s and early 1960s as Fabian Forte.

After school Evans would entertain customers at his various jobs, including Fresh Farm Poultry in the Italian Market on Ninth Street and at the Produce Market with songs and jokes. It was his boss at the Produce Market, Tony A., who gave Evans the nickname "Chubby". The store owner of Fresh Farm Poultry, Henry Colt, was so impressed by Ernest's performances for the customers that he, along with his colleague and friend Kal Mann, who worked as a song-writer for Cameo-Parkway Records, arranged for young Chubby to do a private recording for American Bandstand host Dick Clark. It was at this recording session that Evans got his stage name from Clark's wife, who asked Evans what his name was. "Well", he replied, "my friends call me 'Chubby'". As he had just completed a Fats Domino impression, she smiled and said, "As in Checker?" That little play on words ('chubby' meaning 'fat', and 'checkers', like 'dominoes', being a game) got an instant laugh and stuck, and from then on, Evans would use the name "Chubby Checker".

Checker privately recorded a novelty single for Clark in which the singer portrayed a school teacher with an unruly classroom of musical performers. The premise allowed Checker to imitate such acts as Fats Domino, The Coasters, Elvis Presley, Cozy Cole, and Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian Forte as The Chipmunks, each singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Clark sent the song out as his Christmas greeting, and it received such good response that Cameo-Parkway signed Checker to a recording contract. Titled "The Class", the single became Checker's first release, charting at #38 in the spring of 1959.

Checker introduced his version of "The Twist" at the age of 18 in July 1960 in Wildwood, New Jersey at the Rainbow Club, "The Twist" went on to become the only single to top the Billboard Hot 100 twice, in two separate chart runs. (Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" had done so on Billboard's earlier chart.)

"The Twist" had previously peaked at #16 on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart, in the 1959 version recorded by its author, Hank Ballard, whose band The Midnighters first performed the dance on stage. Checker's "Twist", however, was a nationwide smash, aided by his many appearances on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, the Top 10 American Bandstand ranking of the song, and the teenagers on the show who enjoyed dancing the Twist. The song was so ubiquitous that Checker felt that his critics thought that he could only succeed with dance records typecasting him as a dance artist. Checker later lamented:"...in a way, "The Twist" really ruined my life. I was on my way to becoming a big nightclub performer, and "The Twist" just wiped it out.. It got so out of proportion. No one ever believes I have talent."

Despite Checker's initial disapproval, he found follow-up success with a succession of up-tempo dance tracks and produced a series of successful dance-related singles, including "The Hucklebuck" (#14), "The Fly" (#7), "Dance the Mess Around" (#24), and "Pony Time", which became his second #1 single. Checker's follow-up "twist" single, "Let's Twist Again", won the 1961 Grammy Award for Best Rock and Roll Solo Vocal Performance. A 1962 duet with Dee Dee Sharp, "Slow Twistin'", reached #3 on the national charts. "Limbo Rock" reached #2 in the fall of 1962, becoming Checker's last Top Ten hit.

In 1963 he appeared on The Chubby Checker Show special in Stockhom Sweden on YouTube. Checker continued to have Top 40 singles until 1965, but changes in public taste ended his hit-making career. He spent much of the rest of the 1960s touring and recording in Europe.

His material during his 1960s heyday was recorded for Cameo-Parkway Records and along with the label's other material, became unavailable after the early 1970s because of the company's internal legal disputes. For decades, almost all compilations of Checker's hits consisted of re-recordings. The 1970s saw him become a staple on the oldies circuit, including a temporary stint as a disco artist. Chubby Checker continued to be a superstar in Europe with television and records. A dance-floor cover version of The Beatles' "Back in the U.S.S.R." was released in 1969 on Buddah Records, but only charted at #82. It was Checker's last chart appearance until 1982 when he hit #92 with "Running".

He also recorded a psychedelic album in the early '70s that was initially only released in Europe. Originally the album was namedChequered!, but was renamed New Revelation in later releases. To this day, Checker dislikes talking about the album.

Checker had a single at #1 on Billboard's dance chart in July 2008 with "Knock Down the Walls". The single also made the top 30 on the Adult Contemporary chart. He continues to perform on a regular basis.

In 2009, Checker recorded a public service announcement (PSA) for the Social Security Administration to help launch a new campaign to promote recent changes in Medicare law. In the PSA, Checker encourages Americans on Medicare to apply for Extra Help, "A new 'twist' in the law makes it easier than ever to save on your prescription drug plan costs."

On February 25, 2013, Checker released a new single, the inspirational ballad "Changes," via iTunes; it was posted on YouTube on April 28, 2013, and by mid-July had amassed over 26,000 views. He performed it on July 5, 2013, on a Morning Concert on NBC's Today show. Unlike his dance and novelty records, the song showcased Checker as a serious singer.

In 2002, Chubby Checker protested to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that his hit "The Twist" was not receiving sufficient airplay, claiming that "Peppermint Twist receives more airplay". Seymour Stein, president of the Rock Hall's New York chapter and member of the nomination committee, claimed "I think that Chubby is someone who will be considered. He has in certain years."

In 2013, Checker sued HP over a WebOS application with the same name. The application, before being pulled in September 2012, was used to unscientifically estimate penis size from shoe size. The district court said that Checker's trademark claim survived Hewlett-Packard's motion to dismiss, but his other claims were dismissed per Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Chubby performed as well as appeared as a version of himself in Twist Around the Clock (1961) and Don't Knock the Twist (1962). In both films he provided advice and crucial breaks for the protagonist.

He later appeared as himself in the 1989 Quantum Leap episode entitled "Good Morning, Peoria" where he walks into a radio station in 1959 hoping to have his demo record played on the air. The show's main character, Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) convinces the station owner to play the song "The Twist", inadvertently teaching Chubby himself how to do The Twist.

In 2001 he again guest-starred as himself singing "The Twist" in season 4 of Ally McBeal.

In 2008 Chubby Checker's "The Twist" was named the biggest chart hit of all time by Billboard magazine. Billboard looked at all singles that made the charts between 1958 and 2008. He was also honored by Settlement Music School as part of the school's centennial celebration and named to the Settlement 100, a list of notable people connected to the school.

Checker received the prestigious Sandy Hosey Lifetime Achievement Award on November 9, 2013 from the Artists Music Guild. Checker was the host of the 2013 AMG Heritage Awards and was given the honor during the television broadcast. The award was presented to him by long time friend Dee Dee Sharp.

On 12 December 1963 he, by then a millionaire at 22 years old, proposed marriage to Catharina Lodders, a 21-year-old Dutch model and Miss World 1962 from Haarlem, the Netherlands. Checker said he met Miss Lodders in Manila the prior January. They were married on 12 April 1964 at Temple Lutheran Church in Pennsauken, NJ. Their first child, Bianca Johanna Evans, was born in a Philadelphia hospital on 8 December 1966 at 12:36 am weighing 7 pounds, 14 ounces.

Paavo Järvi

2014-09-15T21:58:00.001+03:00

Paavo Järvi (born 30 December 1962) is an Estonian conductor.

Järvi was born in Tallinn, Estonia, to conductor Neeme Järvi and Liilia Järvi. His siblings, Kristjan Järvi and Maarika Järvi, are also musicians. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music with Max Rudolf and Otto-Werner Mueller, and at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute with Leonard Bernstein. From 1994 to 1997, Järvi was principal conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. From 1995 to 1998, he shared the title of principal conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra with Sir Andrew Davis. Järvi was music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 2001 to 2011. The orchestra made a number of recordings for the Telarc label during Järvi's tenure. In May 2011, he was named the orchestra's Music Director Laureate. Since 2004, he has been the artistic director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, Bremen and an Artistic Advisor to the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. In 2006, Järvi became the principal conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, and served in the post until 2014. In 2010, he became music director of the Orchestre de Paris. He is scheduled to conclude his tenure with the Orchestre de Paris at the conclusion of his current contract, at the end of the summer of 2016. In June 2012, the NHK Symphony Orchestra named Järvi its next chief conductor, beginning in the 2015–2016 season, with an initial contract of three years. Järvi has recorded for the RCA label as well as Deutsche Grammophon, Pentatone, Telarc, ECM, BIS and Virgin Records. His Virgin Classics recording of Sibelius Cantatas with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Estonian National Male Choir and Ellerhein Girls Choir won a Grammy Award for „Best Choral Performance“.

Järvi has two daughters from his past marriage to the violinist Tatiana Berman.

Dario Fo

2014-08-07T11:45:00.000+03:00

Dario Fo (born 24 March 1926) is an Italian actor-playwright, comedian, singer, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter and political campaigner, and recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. "Arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre", much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of "illegitimate" forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari (medieval strolling players) and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell'arte.

His plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed across the world, including in Argentina, Chile, England, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. His work of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is peppered with criticisms of assassinations, corruption, organised crime, racism, Roman Catholic theology and war. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he took to lampooning Forza Italia and its leader Silvio Berlusconi, while his targets of the 2010s have included the banks amid the European sovereign-debt crisis. Also in the 2010s, he became the main ideologue of the Five Star Movement, the anti-establishment party led by Beppe Grillo, often referred by its members as "the Master".

Fo's solo pièce célèbre, titled Mistero Buffo and performed across Europe, Canada and Latin America over a 30-year period, is recognised as one of the most controversial and popular spectacles in postwar European theatre and has been denounced by the Vatican as "the most blasphemous show in the history of television". The title of the original English translation of Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! (Can't Pay? Won't Pay!) has passed into the English language.

His receipt of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature marked the "international acknowledgment of Fo as a major figure in twentieth-century world theatre". The Swedish Academy praised Fo as a writer "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden". He currently owns and operates a theatre company.

An eldest child, Fo was born at Leggiuno Sangiano, in Lombardy's Province of Varese, near the eastern shore of Lago Maggiore. His younger brother Fulvio would become a theatre administrator, their younger sister Bianca Fo Garambois, a writer. Their mother, Pina Rota Fo, from a peasant background, wrote a book of reminiscences of the area between the wars, Il paese delle rane (Land of Frogs, 1978). Their father, Felice, was a station master for the Italian state railway, and the family frequently moved along the Swiss border when Felice was transferred to new postings. Felice, a socialist, was also an actor, appearing for an amateur theatre company in works by Ibsen among others. Fo learned storytelling from his maternal grandfather and Lombard fishers and glassblowers. Among the places in which Fo lived during his early years was Porto Valtravaglia, a glassblowing colony in which, it has been claimed, resided the highest percentage of insane people in Italy.

In 1940, Fo moved to Milan to study at the Brera Academy. However, the Second World War intervened. Fo joined the fascist army of Mussolini's Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Years later, Fo supported this moot thesis: his family was active in the anti-fascist Resistance; Fo helped his father to smuggle refugees and Allied soldiers to Switzerland by disguising them as Lombard peasants. His father is also thought to have helped smuggle Jewish scientists to the safety of Switzerland. As the end of the war approached, Fo joined the anti-aircraft division of the navy, anticipating an immediate discharge due to a shortage of munitions. He was mistaken and was instead dispatched to a camp in Monza at which Benito Mussolini himself arrived. Fo soon deserted with the aid of false documents and wandered for a while before joining a parachute squadron. He then deserted this as well, prompting a further unsuccessful search for the Resistance movement during which he slept rough in the countryside.

After the war Fo returned to the Brera Academy, also taking up architectural studies at the Politecnico di Milano. He started a thesis on Roman architecture, but becoming disillusioned by the cheap impersonal work expected of architects after the war, he left his studies before his final examinations. He had a nervous breakdown; a doctor told him to spend time doing that which brought him joy. He began to paint and became involved in the piccoli teatri (small theatres) movement, in which he began to present improvised monologues.

He considered his artistic influences to include Beolco, Brecht, Chekhov, De Filippo, Gramsci, Mayakovsky, Molière, Shaw, and Strehler.

In 1950, Fo asked to work with Franco Parenti on a variety show performed by radio actors, beginning a collaboration that would last until 1954. Fo delighted audiences with stories of his upbringing that Parenti was very impressed by, describing them as "absolutely original, with an extraordinary humour, wit and personification. When the show was over we'd go for walks round the lake and he'd tell me more stories. In this way we originated a project in which we would work together on a new type of revue, one which didn't copy reality, but which involved people and took a stand."

In late 1951, after Fo had gained experience with Parenti, Italian national radio station RAI invited Fo to perform a solo Saturday evening comedy series Poer nano (Poor dwarf), airing after Parenti's Anacleto the Gas Man. Fo created 18 adult fairy tale monologues adapted from biblical and historical tales. The series also featured Shakespearean tales with various twists, such as a version of Hamlet in which the titular character kills his father to continue an affair with his mother; Ophelia is portrayed as Hamlet's uncle's transvestite mistress, while Horatio plays the ghost of Hamlet's father dressed up as a sheet and only appears when Hamlet is drunk. The series also featured an albino Othello and a sadistic Juliet who keeps Romeo in her garden with savage dogs. Scandalised authorities cancelled the show. Nevertheless, Fo performed it on stage at the Teatro Odeon in Milan in 1952, which allowed him to develop the gesture and action not required for radio. Also in 1952, Fo performed Cocoricò with Giustino Durano, which featured a 20-minute sketch focusing on the plight of black people in the United States.

In 1953, Fo – in collaboration with Parenti and Durano in their own revue company which they called I Dritti (The Stand-ups) – co-wrote, co-directed and designed the sets and costumes for a revue called Il dito nell'occhio (A finger in the eye). The title referred to that of a column in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) newspaper l'Unità. Il dito nell'occhio consisted of 21 sketches similar in style to Poer nano but dealing instead with a satirical history of the world. The last performance in which Fo played a supporting role, it was a box-office success and went on tour after 113 performances at Milan's Piccolo Teatro. 1953 also brought the beginning of Fo's songwriting. He collaborated with Fiorenzo Carpi; all of Fo's plays as far as 1967 would feature Carpi's music. "La luna è una lampadina" ("The moon is a lightbulb"), their first song, is one of Fo's most famous.

Fo met Franca Rame, daughter of a theatrical family, when they were working in the revue Sette giorni a Milano. They became engaged, and he married her on 24 June 1954. They had a son, Jacopo (born 31 March 1955), who would also become a writer.

With the break-up of I dritti due to financial failure, Fo and family moved to Rome in the hope of gaining work as a screenwriter in the cinema. There they lived next door to Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Fo worked for many productions, including those of Dino De Laurentiis. Rame worked in Teatro Stabile of Bolzano. In 1956, Fo co-wrote and acted with Rame in the Carlo Lizzani's film Lo svitato (The screwball), influenced by Jacques Tati, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In the film, Fo plays "a disoriented hotel porter cast adrift in a neo-capitalist Milan of skyscrapers and modern technology". Other films followed. In 1958, the couple returned to Milan when Rame was offered roles in a series of farces at the Arlecchino Theatre. Fo and Rame have been based there ever since. Fo said, "For me the lesson of the cinema meant learning from a technical point of view what audiences had already grasped: a story divided into sequences, a fast pace, sharp dialogue, and getting rid of the conventions of space and time. Working on screenplays gave me an apprenticeship as a playwright and I was able to transfer the lessons of the new technical means to the theatre".

The foundation of the Compagnia Fo-Rame dates from this time. Fo wrote scripts, acted, directed, and designed costumes and stage paraphernalia. Rame took care of the administration. The company débuted at the Piccolo Teatro, and in 1959 began a series of six full-length plays that were performed each season at the Teatro Odeon. One of these, Gli arcangeli non giocano al flipper (Archangels Don't Play Pinball), brought Fo and Rame national and, later, international recognition. It would be the first Fo play to be performed outside Italy – in Yugoslavia, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. Other successes would follow.

In 1962, Fo wrote and directed a variety show, Canzonissima, for RAI. Fo used the show to give Italians a glimpse of a type of television resembling the origins of theatre, one far removed from the diversionary and trivial dross which until then had been churned out by one of the world's leading producers of "junk TV". Canzonissima featured satirical songs and sketches depicting the lives of the working classes. However, it was regularly censored. One sketch featured a fat aunt who came to visit her nephew at his workplace (a canned meat factory) only to fall into a machine and come out as mincemeat, which the nephew retained in a cupboard at home and often displayed to friends: this led to complaints from canned meat producers and "industrialists in general" – though none from aunts, Fo later observed. Nonetheless Canzonissima proved popular, attracting millions of viewers, and Rame maintained that taxi drivers in Italian cities would often say they had no work during broadcasts as everyone was watching it. Its eighth episode – which referenced the dangerous conditions faced by workers on building sites – led to a dispute with the programme's producers, and prompted Fo and Rame to walk out on 29 November 1962. RAI maintained it would not broadcast the sketch as it risked further inflaming the annoyance of building workers' unions at working conditions. National uproar ensued over this censorship, with headlines in the daily newspapers and questions in the Italian parliament. RAI sued Fo and Rame and destroyed all the Canzonissima recordings. The dispute led to the effective banning of Fo and Rame from Italian television for 14 years.

Fo returned to Milan's Teatro Odeon with the play Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciballe (Isabella, Three Sailing Ships and a Con Man), considered "an attempt to demystify and debunk the traditional history-book image" of Christopher Columbus. Fo said: "I wanted to attack those Italian intellectuals who, with the centre-left and the Socialist Party in the government, had discovered power and its advantages and leapt on it like rats on a piece of cheese. I wanted to dismantle a character who had been embalmed as a hero in school history books, whereas he is in fact an intellectual who tries to keep afloat within the mechanisms of power, play games with the King and be cunning with power figures, only to end up reduced to a wretch." Fo received threatening letters, was assaulted in Rome with Rame by fascist groups who also threw rubbish at them, while another performance was disrupted by a bomb scare. He recounted this event in the prologue of Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas.

La signora è da buttare (Throw the Lady Out) was the final play Fo put on in the mainstream, establishment Italian theatre. Performed in 1967, it contained topical references to the Vietnam War, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The play prompted the first English-language piece of criticism on Fo's work by U.S. critic A. Richard Sogliuzzo in 1972. He interpreted the titular lady as "representing American capitalism ... and who just before her death] was elevated above a sink in a Statue of Liberty pose, and then ascended to a heaven packed with consumer goods". The U.S. government would later consistently deny Fo entry under the now-defunct McCarran-Walter Act.

Inspired by the events of May 1968 in France, Fo and Rame abandoned the official state theatre in Italy and set up Associazione Nuova Scena, a theatre collective operating outside the state structure. They asked the PCI for assistance and access to community centres and workers' clubs. In October 1968, they toured Fo's latest play Grande pantomima con bandiere e pupazzi piccoli i medi (Grand Pantomime with Flags and Small and Middle-sized Puppets), opening in Cesena. The play, which featured masks instead of characters –representing Capital, the Confederation of Industry, High Finance, the Church, the People, Rebels and Peasants – ,included a giant puppet representing fascism which gave birth to representatives of the Church, the Monarchy, the Army and Industrialism. L'operaio conosce 300 parole, il padrone 1,000: per questo lui è il padrone (The Worker Knows 300 Words, the Boss Knows 1000, That's Why He's the Boss), Legame pure che tanto io spacco tutto lo stesso (Chain Me Up and I'll Still Smash Everything), and Mistero Buffo (Comical Mystery) also date from this time. Though Fo himself had never been a Communist Party member, his open criticism of PCI methods and policies on the stage led to conflict with the Party.

In 1970, Fo and Rame began their third theatre group, Collettivo Teatrale "La Comune" with the musician Paolo Ciarchi and the administrator Nanni Ricordi. They based themselves at an abandoned workshop (capannone) in via Colletta in a working-class suburb of Milan for three years, converting it into a sort of community centre and producing plays based on improvisation about contemporary issues. One such play was Vorrei morire stasera se dovessi pensare che non è servito a niente (I'd Rather Die Tonight If I Had To Think It Had All Been In Vain). Inspired by the Black September, with the title derived from a Renata Viganò poem, thousands of people came to see it.

What followed was Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist), Fo's most internationally recognised play, described by the playwright as "a grotesque farce about a tragic farce". It opened in December 1970, Fo having written it after right-wing extremists and the Italian Secret Service carried out a "terrorist" attack on the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969. This farce subsequently toured Italy with Tutti uniti! Tutti insieme! Ma scusa, quello non è il padrone? (United We Stand! All Together Now! Oops, Isn't That the Boss?), considered by Rame to be Fo's best work apart from Morte accidentale and Mistero buffo. Morte e resurezione di un pupazzo (Death and Resurrection of a Puppet) was an updated version of Grande pantomima. Fedayn, first performed in January 1972, comprised a series of autobiographical accounts from Palestine.

In March 1973, fascists commissioned by high-ranking officials in Milan's Carabinieri (Italian federal police) abducted Rame, held her at gunpoint and dumped her in a van. They raped her, beat her, burnt her with cigarettes, slashed her with razor blades and left her in a park. A split in La Comune reduced their ranks; nevertheless, Fo and Rame continued to tour around Lombardy and Veneto throughout that year, the short piece Mamma Togni dating from this time. In September 1973, following the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, Guerra di popolo in Cile (The People's War in Chile) came to be. It toured the country amassing great interest, particularly due to a part at the end which unnerved audiences who thought a coup had been declared across Italy. According to Chiara Valentini, a member of the audience panicked during a performance in Turin and ate ten pages of what he thought might be compromising names, while in Merano a student broke the glass in an attempt to flee through a window. The real police arrested Fo in Sassari in November 1973, leading to nationwide uproar when it emerged that under Italian law the police could not enter the theatre during the performance; the outcry served only to boost attendances at future performances.

In 1974, the company – which had now become Il Collettivo Teatrale "La Comune" diretto da Dario Fo –occupied and cleaned up an abandoned market building in Porta Vittoria (a working-class area of Milan) and dubbed it the Palazzina Liberty. Political enmities intervened however, and Milan's council tried to remove them by court order. The council was unsuccessful; the company was allowed to stay temporarily and set about developing facilities such as a library, conference centre, theatre and audiovisual workshops. They began performing with Porta e Belli contro il potere (Porta and Belli Against the Authorities), in which Fo read sonnets by the two titular 19th-century poets, described by him as "splendid texts, and when I recited them individually they worked marvellously, but not altogether in the same show." Soon followed the farce, Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! (Can't Pay? Won't Pay!), documenting the autoriduzione (self-reduction) movement which had developed during the severe economic crisis Italy was experiencing, and in which women (and men) would take what they wished from markets, only paying for what they could afford. Regarded as Fo's best-known play internationally after Morte accidentale di un anarchico, it had been performed in 35 countries by 1990. The title Can't Pay? Won't Pay! has also passed into the English language.

To the backdrop of the June 1975 Italian elections, Fo wrote Il Fanfani rapito (Fanfani Kidnapped) – a reference to Amintore Fanfani. Also in June 1975, Fo, Rame and other members of the company went to China – Fo later used his recollections of the trip in the monologue La storia della tigre (The Tale of a Tiger), with which he toured around Italy in 1978. The same year (1975) Fo was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the first time. He thought the idea absurd: "I have become famous for my aversion to figures of reverence and genuflections of any kind. This Nobel business is a real comedy. I can imagine the look on the faces of certain state officials, magistrates and politicians I know. They take great pains to shut me up and clap me in handcuffs, and the Swedes go and play a trick like this... [Receiving the prize] would be like acting in one of my plays."

Fo next turned to Italy's growing drug problem, summing it up as follows: "Rich people consume and use drugs, while poor people are used and consumed by drugs." La marijuana della mamma è la più bella (Mother's Marijuana is the Best) features a character called Grandpa who mistakenly swallows LSD instead of aspirin and hallucinates a farcical tram journey in his wardrobe ending at a police station. Fiorenzo Carpi returned to collaborate with Fo on the play's music, the first time they had worked together since 1967. Fo returned to television in 1977 after 14 years off the air, RAI's administration having been changed following the previous year's general election. Fo was, however, limited to Rai 2, the second channel, which had a more socialist and non-religious slant than the more conservative Rai 1. Two cycles of his plays were broadcast; for political reasons these did not include Morte accidentale di un anarchico, Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! or Il Fanfani rapito (though La Commune filmed them anyway to have a permanent record of them). Even so, the Vatican still denounced Mistero buffo as "the most blasphemous show in the history of television". A new play for the TV series, Parliamo di donne (Let's Talk About Women), focused on topics such as abortion, sexism and the Holy Family.

A series of five monologues collectively titled Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (All House, Bed and Church) also first appeared in 1977, and were performed by Rame. Il risveglio (Waking Up) featured a working class mother talking to her baby (a doll). Una donna tutta sola (A Woman Alone) was about a housewife locked indoors by her husband who must deal with a crying baby while fighting off the advances of his crippled wheelchair-bound pornographic film-obsessed brother, a man with a telescope, an obscene telephone caller and a former teacher who has fallen in love with her. La mamma fricchettona (Freak Mother) featured a mother taking shelter in a church confessional after leaving her family to pursue drugs and free love. The Same Old Story features a little girl with a doll who swears. Medea, based on an Italian version rather than the more famous Euripides version, had been performed in 35 countries by 1990 – though it annoyed some English feminists.

In 1980, United States authorities blocked Fo and Rame from performing at the country's Festival of Italian Theatre, with their banishment from the country compared to the country's similar treatment of Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin and Gabriel García Márquez. In May that year, "An Evening Without Dario Fo and Franca Rame", held in New York, was attended by offended persons, among whom were Arthur Miller, Bernard Malamud, Richard Foreman and Martin Scorsese. The event featured a reading in English of the first act of Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! and a letter (read by Piero Sciotto) written by Fo and Rame. The American Critics' Association sent a letter to Edmund Muskie, an important politician.

However, in September 1983, U.S. authorities again refused them permission to enter, and, to Fo's bewilderment, accused them of "belonging to organisations supporting terrorist groups." At this time Fo was the foreign writer whose plays were most widely produced in that country. Joseph Papp sent a telegram to the country's president – retired actor Ronald Reagan – to no avail. Fo and Rame began a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department, pledging any damages received to sacked workers and occupied workplaces, the disabled, families of prisoners and other causes of which they were fond. Fo called a press conference in Milan to explain the grave offence U.S. authorities had caused himself and his wife: "We are Italian citizens who are supposed to have committed the crime of aiding and abetting terrorists in Italy. The Italian judicial authorities, however have never charged us or even made inquiries... nor have they accused us of any support of terrorism: in any case our position on the subject is well known. Now the Americans arrive on the scene and decide that we support terrorists, which means either that the Italian judicial authorities aren't doing their job or that they are in complicity with us."

In 1981, with La Commune having been evicted from the Palazzina Liberty, a second version of Tutta casa, letto e chiesa opened at the Teatro Odeon, the first time in 16 years that Fo and Rame performed there. Also that year (January) Clacson, trombette e pernacchi (Trumpets and Raspberries) was first performed at Milan's Cinema Cristallo, and was Fo's first new play since La marijuana della mamma è la più bella five years previously. 50,000 people saw it performed 34 times in Milan, and it had soon been produced in 15 other countries. In 1983, Italian censors restricted Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (The Open Couple) to audiences over the age of 18 when Rame included as a prologue her monologue The Rape (inspired by her own rape). Il candelaio (The Candlestickmaker), a monologue written by Fo in 1983, displayed Fo's increased interest in the English Elizabethan Theatre, and preceded Quasi per caso una donna: Elisabetta (Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman), which Fo and Rame began work on in late 1984. 1985 brought Hellequin, Harlekin, Arlecchino – based on Harlequin. 1986 brought Kidnapping Francesca, in which bankrupt banker Francesca Bollini de Rill has herself kidnapped to divert from her imminent arrest – adapted as Abducting Diana in 1994 by Stephen Stenning for English audiences. Appointed Professor of Drama at the University of Rome, Fo's seminars there included Harlequin and the commedia dell'arte.

The pre-Christmas 1987 performance of The First Miracle of the Infant Jesus on Italian television's variety-lottery show Fantastico led to further accusations of blasphemy from the Vatican; Fo portrayed the titular character deploying bolts of lightning to save other children from a bully. For the first time in 26 years, in April and May 1988, Fo and Rame collaborated on an original project, Transmissione forzata (Forced Transmission) on Italian television. Restricted to Rai 3, the series featured ironic songs about RAI censorship and Italian politicians, dancing girls and satirical news bulletins, a ballet on Palestine and a "weather report" on national rape statistics. Also in 1988, Fo returned to film acting for the first time since 1958, playing a retired professor in Musica per vecchi animali (Music for Old Animals).

In 1989, in solidarity with those affected by the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Fo updated La storia della tigre and wrote two monologues Lettera dalla Cina (Letter from China) and The Story of Qu. The same year, Fo also wrote Il ricercato (The Wanted Man), an unperformed play about the mafia, and Il Papa e la strega (The Pope and the Witch), which debuted in late October. The latter portrayed a Pope overcome both by a phobia of being attacked by children and by an attack of arthritis which leaves his arms raised in blessing, and who, acting upon the advice of a woman disguised as a nun and claiming to be a witch, swings from a chandelier and injects himself with heroin during his search for a cure, and avoids various assassination attempts involving a toy car, poisoned parrot and Brazilian nun. Critics praised its comic inventiveness and it won an award for being the play seen by most people in Italy that season.

Addressing themes such as AIDS, the Gulf War and genetic experiments, Fo wrote Zitti! Stiamo precipitando! (Hush! We're Falling!) in summer 1990, and it debuted at Milan's Teatro Nuovo that November. The titular character of Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas, Fo's response to the 1992 quincentennial celebrations of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, is a Venetian fugitive who escapes from the Spanish Inquisition by joining the explorer and coloniser's fourth voyage. Forced to tend the animals on board, a storm casts him adrift in the ocean on the back of a pig until he reaches the coast and is rescued by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A video recording of Fo's performance exists. 1993 brought an important anniversary of Carlo Goldoni; Fo, who was unimpressed, and, choosing instead to focus his attention on Angelo Beolco, planned a joint production between his company and Teatro dei Incamminati, a publicly funded company. However, with rehearsals well underway, a ministerial letter arrived to block the project's completion with "an obscure law forbidding co-productions between public and private companies."

Fo and Rame collaborated on the monologue Settimo: ruba un po' meno no. 2 (Seventh Commandment: Steal a Bit Less No. 2), inspired by the corruption scandals (Tangentopoli) which were rife in Italy during the 1990s. They later performed Mamma! I sanculotti! (Mummy! The Sans-culottes!), set in the eighteenth century but also making references to the Tangentopoli, and featuring music again by Fiorenzo Carpi. For the 1994 monologue Sesso? Grazie, tanto per gradire! (Sex? Thanks, Don't Mind If I Do!), Fo and Rame worked with their Jacopo to produce a performance based on Jacopo's 1992 book Lo Zen e l'arte di scopare (Zen and the Art of Fucking), featuring educational pieces on topics such as AIDS, contraception, sex education and sexual repression. Thus came Fo's first run-in with the new government of Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusoni's government banned Italians under the age of 18 from seeing it over fears, it said, that the play could "cause offence to the common decency which requires respect for spheres of decency, and provoke distress among adolescent spectators, with possible effects on their behaviour in relation to sex", thus defeating the original purpose of the performance. Much free publicity ensued, with the censorship issue being debated in the national parliament, teachers calling for it to be performed, and audiences and both Italian and foreign intellectuals signing a petition calling for the ban to be overturned.

On 17 July 1995, Fo had a stroke which he quickly recovered from and was well again by his seventieth birthday on 24 March 1996. In summer 1996, he wrote Leonardo: The Flight, the Count and the Amours. Set in 1502, the titular character of the play was Leonardo da Vinci. In 1997, he wrote Il diavolo con le zinne (The Devil with Boobs). Described by Fo as "a Machiavellian comedy, a gigantic late sixteenth-century intrigue, with judges and devils, housekeepers possessed by devils, hermits, gendarmes, torturers and even a monkey", it featured an homage to Fiorenzo Carpi who had died earlier that year.

9 October 1997 brought the announcement from Sweden that Fo had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming both the first Italian to be selected for the award since Eugenio Montale in 1975 and the first Italian playwright to be chosen since Luigi Pirandello in 1934. The Swedish Academy, in its citation, praised him as a writer "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden". Fo, driving along the Rome-Milan motorway at the time of the announcement, was alerted to the news when a car drew up alongside his with an enormous placard in the window exclaiming "Dario, you've won the Nobel prize!" 20-year-old TV star Ambra Angiolini was alongside him in the car recording an interview, so Fo's initial reaction was captured on film.

The announcement came as a shock to Italians and non-Italians alike. Umberto Eco expressed delight that the award had been given to someone who "does not belong to the traditional academic world." However, 86-year-old Italian literary critic Carlo Bo was mystified: "I must be too old to understand. What does this mean? That everything changes, even literature has changed." Fo's fellow Italian laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini expressed bewilderment when asked for her thoughts and wondered if Fo were Italian. Mario Luzi, a poet regarded as a likely next Italian recipient at the time, slammed the phone down on one reporter: "I'll say only this. I've just about had it up to here!" Reaction from the Anglosphere was also particularly fierce, with representatives from many English-speaking countries regarding Fo's work as unfashionable and outdated, belonging to the 1970s and 1980s. U.S. playwright Tony Kushner, however, expressed his approval, writing: " Fo has dedicated his genius to making everything he touches debatable. It is brave and perhaps even reckless because it subjects Literature, and prizes, and Newspapers of Record, to the Fo effect". When he accepted the award, Fo presented a specially devised piece called Contra jogulatores obloquentes (Against Jesters of Irreverent Speech) alongside some paintings, with this later being described as "undoubtedly the most flamboyantly theatrical and comical acceptance speech ever seen at the Swedish Academy."

In 2004, Forza Italia senator Marcello Dell'Utri, on trial at the time for money laundering, sued Fo over references to him in his latest play. Fo was disgusted: "I have been doing satire for 40 years. It is paradox. It is grotesque." The play, titled The Two-Headed Anomaly and first performed in 2003, also poked fun at the shortness of then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, had him strapped to a chair and given electric shock treatment and portrayed Vladimir Putin being shot dead by Chechen rebels while visiting Berlusconi's luxury villa in Sicily. The title referred to the subsequent transplanting of Putin's brain into Berlusconi's head, and the play was performed amid debate over Berlusconi's business and political interests and media censorship, with RAI having barred Italian satirists Sabina Guzzanti and Paolo Rossi from its television channels. Fo spoke of receiving threats from politicians if he performed it.

In 2005, Fo revealed plans to run for Mayor of Milan, the most economically important city in Italy, the following year. He said it was part of his ongoing fight to rid Milan of Berlusconi's political colleague Gabriele Albertini, the incumbent mayor. Ostracised by Italian television (both state – RAI having shunted his latest show off to a graveyard slot – and commercial-three quarters owned by Fo's long-time adversary Berlusconi), Fo instead elected to campaign on stage. Under the slogan "I am not a moderate", he opposed the centre-right administration's plans to demolish parts of the city centre and vowed to chase out those "money-grabbing bastards who have run this city for decades." Securing 23.4% of the vote in the primary election of centre-left The Union in January 2006, he was ultimately unsuccessful, finishing second to Milan's former police chief Bruno Ferrante.

Throughout the 21st century, Fo has remained an active participant and campaigner on various political, social and cultural issues. He questioned the official accounts of the September 11 attacks and the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings in the film, Zero: An Investigation into 9/11. In 2008, he was among the signatories of an open letter to la Repubblica which called on the state to protect Roberto Saviano, whose life was under threat after exposing the clandestine activities of the Camorra in his 2006 book Gomorrah. Ahead of the 2013 Italian general election, Fo explained that the most recent targets of his satire included: “The banks mostly, and the big entrepreneurs. All those who hold the reins 'the show within a show', i.e. those who – through the media, television and in other ways – make every effort to ensure that the people accept the conditions they find themselves in.”

David Helfgott

2014-06-28T11:06:00.000+03:00

David Helfgott (born 19 May 1947) is an Australian concert pianist. Helfgott's life inspired the Oscar-winning film Shine, in which he was played by Geoffrey Rush.

Helfgott was born in Melbourne to Polish Jewish parents. He became known as a child prodigy after his father started teaching him the piano when he was five. When he was ten years old he studied under Frank Arndt, a Perth piano teacher, and won several local competitions—sometimes alone and sometimes with his elder sister Margaret.

At the age of fourteen while studying at Mount Lawley Senior High School, people such as Perth composer James Penberthy and writer Katharine Susannah Prichard raised money to enable him to go to the United States to study music. However, his father denied him permission on the grounds that he was not ready for independence. From age 17 he studied with Alice Carrard, a former student of Béla Bartók and István Thomán. He won the state final of the ABC Instrumental and Vocal Competition six times.

At the age of nineteen, Helfgott won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied under the pianist Cyril Smith for three years. The awards he won at the RCM included the Dannreuther Prize for Best Concerto Performance for his performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, and the Marmaduke Barton Prize.

During his time in London he began showing more definite manifestations of schizoaffective disorder. He returned to Perth in 1970. The following year he married Clare Papp, an older woman with four children. He worked as a rehearsal pianist for the Western Australian Opera Company and also took part in several ABC concerts. After his brief marriage broke down he was institutionalised in Graylands, a Perth mental hospital. Over the next ten years, he underwent psychiatric treatment which included psychotropic medication and electroconvulsive therapy.

In 1983 his brother Les Helfgott found him work at a Perth wine bar called Riccardo's. In 1984, at Riccardo's, Helfgott met Gillian Murray, an astrologer. They married later that year.

Helfgott was the subject of the 1996 film Shine, which dealt with the pianist's formative years and struggle with mental illness. Helfgott was portrayed by actors Geoffrey Rush (adult), Noah Taylor (teenager) and Alex Rafalowicz (child). The film has come in for strong criticism from Helfgott's sister for a range of alleged inaccuracies, particularly for the portrayal of his father as a violent and tyrannical despot

Helfgott generally prefers to perform Romantic music, mostly Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Rimsky-Korsakov. However, his recordings and performances, especially that of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, have been criticized as "pallid, erratic and incoherent." Of the two commercial recordings released by RCA, the American journal Fanfare Magazine was critical not only of Helfgott himself, but also of his producers, who were "marketing Helfgott's pain." The British magazine Gramophone was similarly scathing about the exploitative nature of their issue, which, the magazine said, marketed Helfgott as an "unsung genius" when it was obvious from the recordings that he was not.

On stage, Helfgott is known for his unusual platform manner. In 1997, critic Anthony Tommasini noted that Helfgott "stares into the hall and renders a nonstop commentary of grunts, groans and mutterings".

In December 1999, Helfgott was the opener for the "Geniuses, Savants and Prodigies" conference of Allan Snyder's Centre for the Mind.

Also in 1999, Helfgott appeared on the rock group Silverchair's album Neon Ballroom (on the opening track, Emotion Sickness). Ben Gillies, the drummer of Silverchair, described Helfgott's adding of the brilliant and difficult piano track to the song, as one of the greatest things he'd seen a musician do. The piano arrangement was made by Larry Muhoberac.

Helfgott tours Australia annually and plays a small number of recitals in other countries.

Helfgott and his second wife, Gillian, live in The Promised Land, a valley near Bellingen in New South Wales.

When not at the piano his other interests include reading, watching television, listening to music (preferably all at the same time), cats, chess, philosophy, swimming and keeping fit. A former cigarette smoker, Helfgott quit many years ago due to the influence of his first wife.

The Bryan brothers

2014-06-28T10:54:00.000+03:00

The Bryans or Bryan Brothers refers to twins Robert Charles Bryan (Bob) and Michael Carl Bryan (Mike), who are American professional doubles tennis players. The identical twins have won multiple Olympic medals, including the gold in 2012 and have won more professional games, matches, tournaments and Grand Slams than any other pairing. They have held the World No. 1 doubles ranking jointly for 367 weeks (as of June 9, 2014), which is longer than anyone else in doubles history. They have also finished the ATP year-end number 1 doubles team a record 9 times. Between 2005 and 2006, they set an Open Era record by competing in seven consecutive men's doubles Grand Slam finals. On April 11, 2013, they recorded their Open Era record 800th match win by defeating Johan Brunstrom and Jesse Levine in the semi-finals of Houston. Following their triumph at the 2013 Wimbledon Championships, the Bryans became the only doubles pairing in the Open Era to hold all four major titles at once, as well as the only team in history to hold all four majors and Olympic gold simultaneously. They are also the only doubles team in history to have won every major title, having won all four Grand Slams, Olympic Gold, all 9 Masters series titles, the Year-End Championships and the Davis Cup during their careers.

Born on April 29, 1978, with Mike being older by two minutes, and Bob taller by 3 cm, the two of them have won a record 98 tour titles surpassing The Woodies, and have been finalists on 50 other occasions. They have a Career Golden Slam and 15 grand slam titles overall, which is more than any team in the Open Era. These include victories at the Australian Open (2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013), the French Open (2003, 2013), Wimbledon (2006, 2011, 2013), and the US Open (2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012). They won the Tennis Masters Cup doubles tournament three times (2003, 2004 and 2009). They won the gold medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and the bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They also won the 2007 Davis Cup along with Andy Roddick and James Blake. The Bryan Brothers were named ATP Team of the Decade for 2000–2009.

The twins are part of the United States Davis Cup team, with a 21–4 record in doubles matches. Their four losses were to Croatia's Ivan Ljubičić and Mario Ančić in 2005,[2] in 2008 to France's Arnaud Clément and Michaël Llodra, and in 2013 to Brazil's Marcelo Melo and Bruno Soares as well as Serbia's Nenad Zimonjić and Ilija Bozoljac. Both brothers have played Davis Cup singles matches (Bob is 4–2 and Mike is 0–1).

The brothers, who both use single-handed backhands, are noted for their attacking style of play and great hustle. They are also well known for celebrating winning points by chest-bumping each other.[3] Mike and Bob are featured on the cover of the January/February 2010 issue of Making Music where there is an article about their experiences and passion for recreational music. Some of their success is attributed to their particular brand of twinship. The Bryan brothers are "mirror twins." That is, they mirror each other's movements, one being right-handed and one left-handed. Their court coverage is vastly better than two righties/lefties. This fact was documented in the 60 minutes special on the Bryan brothers. Only about 1 in 300 live births result in monozygotic twins. Only 25% of monozygotic twins are "mirror" or opposite feature twins.

Aside from tennis, they also do charity work in aid of children in need through their foundation, The Bryan Bros. Foundation.

Roger Federer

2014-06-28T10:45:00.001+03:00

Roger Federer (born 8 August 1981) is a Swiss professional tennis player who is currently ranked world no. 4 by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). He has been ranked inside the top 10 continuously since October 2002 and the top 20 since April 2001. Numerous commentators, pundits, and former and current players of the sport regard Federer as the greatest tennis player of all time.

He holds several men's world records of the Open Era: holding the world no. 1 position for 302 weeks overall, including a 237-consecutive-week stretch at the top from 2004 to 2008; winning 17 Grand Slam singles titles; reaching each Grand Slam Final at least five times (an all-time record); and reaching the Wimbledon final eight times. He is one of seven men, and one of four in the Open Era, to capture the career Grand Slam. Federer also shares the Open Era record for most titles at the Australian Open with Agassi and Novak Djokovic (4), at Wimbledon with Pete Sampras (7) and at the US Open with Jimmy Connors and Sampras (5).

Federer has appeared in 24 men's Grand Slam finals, with 10 in a row, both records, and appeared in 18 of 19 finals from the 2005 Wimbledon Championships through to the 2010 Australian Open. He is the only man to reach at least the semifinals of 23 consecutive Grand Slam tournaments, from the 2004 Wimbledon Championships through the 2010 Australian Open. At the 2014 Wimbledon Championships, he played in a record 59th consecutive Grand Slam tournament. Earlier at the 2014 Australian Open, he extended his record to a 34th Grand Slam semi-final and reached a record 41st Grand Slam quarter-final (shared with Connors), and at the 2013 French Open reached a record 36th consecutive Grand Slam quarter-final. He has also won the most matches, 270, in men's Grand Slam tournaments and is the only player to record 60+ wins each at all the Grand Slam tournaments.

Federer's ATP tournament records include winning six ATP World Tour Finals, playing in the finals at all nine ATP Masters 1000 tournaments (a record shared with Djokovic and Nadal), and having won the most prize money of any player in history, with over $80,000,000. He also won the Olympic gold medal in doubles with his compatriot Stanislas Wawrinka at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games and the Olympic silver medal in singles at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. He spent eight years (2003–2010) continuously in the top 2 in the year-end men's rankings and ten (2003–2012) in the top 3. Federer was the first tennis player, male or female, to earn more than 50 million US dollars in prize money.

Federer has won the ATPWorldTour.com Fans' Favourite Award a record eleven times straight (2003–2013) and the Stefan Edberg Sportsmanship Award (voted for by the players) a record nine times (2004–2009, 2011–2013), both being awards indicative of respect and popularity. He also won the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian of the Year Award twice in 2006 and 2013. He was named the Laureus World Sportsman of the Year for a record four consecutive years (2005–2008). Federer is at times referred to as the Federer Express, shortened to Fed Express or FedEx, and the Swiss Maestro, or just Maestro.

Andreï Makine

2014-06-28T10:39:00.002+03:00

Andreï Makine (born 10 September 1957) is a Russian-born French author. He also publishes under the pseudonym Gabriel Osmonde. Makine's novels include Dreams of My Russian Summers (1995) which won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis.

Andreï Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union on 10 September 1957 and grew up in the city of Penza about 440 miles south-east of Moscow. As a boy, having acquired familiarity with France and its language from his French-born grandmother (it is not certain whether Makine had a French grandmother; in later interviews he claimed to have learned French from a friend), he wrote poems in both French and his native Russian.

In 1987, he went to France as a member of a teacher's exchange program and decided to stay. He was granted political asylum and was determined to make a living as a writer in French. However, Makine had to present his first manuscripts as translations from Russian to overcome publishers' skepticism that a newly arrived exile could write so fluently in a second language. After disappointing reactions to his first two novels, it took eight months to find a publisher for his fourth, Dreams of My Russian Summers. Finally published in 1995 in France, the novel became the first in history to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis plus the Goncourt des Lycéens.

In 2001 Makine began secretively publishing as "Gabriel Osmonde", a total of four novels over ten years, the last appearing in 2011. It was a French literary mystery and many speculated about who Osmonde might be. Finally in 2011 a scholar noticed Osmonde's book 20,000 femmes dans la vie d’un homme had been inspired by Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers and Makine confirmed that he was the author. Explaining why he used a pseudonym he said, "I wanted to create someone who lived far from the hurly-burly of the world".

All of Makine's novels have been translated into English by Geoffrey Strachan.

Le testament français was published in English as Dreams of My Russian Summers in the United States, and under its original French title in the United Kingdom. It has also been translated into Russian by Yuliana Yahnina and Natalya Shakhovskaya, and first published in the 12th issue of the Foreign Literature literary magazine in 1996.

Paulo Coelho

2014-06-28T10:32:00.001+03:00

Paulo Coelho (born August 24, 1947), is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. He has become one of the most widely read authors in the world today. He is the recipient of numerous international awards, amongst them the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. The Alchemist, his most famous novel, has been translated into 80 languages. The author has sold 150 million copies worldwide.

Paulo Coelho was born in Brazil and attended a Jesuit school. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer. Upon telling his mother this, she responded with "My dear, your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?" After researching, which was common for him since he was a policy debater when he was in high school, Coelho concluded that a writer "always wears glasses and never combs his hair" and has a "duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation," amongst other things. At 16, Coelho's introversion and opposition to following a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20. Coelho later remarked that "It wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do... They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me." At his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and started using drugs in the 1960s. Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee, and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas. Composing with Raul led to Paulo being associated with magic and occultism, due to the content of some songs. In 1974, Coelho was arrested for "subversive" activities by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous. Coelho also worked as an actor, journalist, and theatre director before pursuing his writing career.

In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a turning point in his life. On the path, Coelho had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage. In an interview, Coelho stated "In 1986, I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water – to use the metaphor in "The Alchemist", I was working, I had a person whom I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer." Coelho would leave his lucrative career as a songwriter and pursue writing full-time.

In 1982 Coelho published his first book, Hell Archives, which failed to make a substantial impact. In 1986 he contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism, although he later tried to take it off the shelves since he considered it “of bad quality." After making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1986, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. The following year, Coelho wrote The Alchemist and published it through a small Brazilian publishing house who made an initial print run of 900 copies and decided not to reprint. He subsequently found a bigger publishing house, and with the publication of his next book Brida, The Alchemist became a Brazilian bestseller. The Alchemist has gone on to sell more than 65 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books in history, and has been translated into 80 different languages, winning the Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author.

The Alchemist, easily known as his most successful story, is a story about a young shepherd who follows his spiritual journey to the Egyptian pyramids in search of a treasure.

Since the publication of The Alchemist, Coelho has generally written one novel every two years including By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, The Fifth Mountain, Veronika Decides to Die, The Devil and Miss Prym, Eleven Minutes, Like the Flowing River, The Valkyries and The Witch of Portobello. While trying to overcome his procrastination of launching his writing career, Coelho said, "If I see a white feather today, that is a sign that God is giving me that I have to write a new book." Coelho found a white feather in the window of a shop, and began writing that day.

In total, Coelho has published 30 books. Three of them – The Pilgrimage,The Valkyries and Aleph – are autobiographical, while the majority of the rest are fictional, although rooted in his life experiences. Others, like Maktub and The Manual of the Warrior of Light, are collections of essays, newspaper columns, or selected teachings. In total, Coelho has sold more than 150 million books in over 150 countries worldwide (224 territories), and his works have been translated into 80 languages. He is the all-time bestselling Portuguese language author.

Coelho also writes up to three blog posts a week at his blog.

Muhammad Yunus

2014-06-28T10:26:00.002+03:00

Muhammad Yunus (born 28 June 1940) is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below". The Norwegian Nobel Committee noted that "lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty" and that "across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development". Yunus has received several other national and international honours. He received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.

In 2008, he was rated #2 in Foreign Policy magazine's list of the 'Top 100 Global Thinkers'.

In February 2011, Yunus together with Saskia Bruysten, Sophie Eisenmann and Hans Reitz co-founded Yunus Social Business – Global Initiatives (YSB). YSB creates and empowers social businesses to address and solve social problems around the world. As the international implementation arm for Yunus’ vision of a new, humane capitalism, YSB manages Incubator Funds for social businesses in developing countries and providing advisory services to companies, governments, foundations and NGOs.

In 2012, he became Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. He is a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology. Previously, he was a professor of economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. He published several books related to his finance work. He is a founding board member of Grameen America and Grameen Foundation, which support microcredit.

Yunus also serves on the board of directors of the United Nations Foundation, a public charity created in 1998 by American philanthropist Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift to support UN causes.

In March 2011, the Bangladesh government fired Yunus from his position at Grameen Bank, citing legal violations and an age limit on his position.[8] Bangladesh's High Court affirmed the removal on 8 March. Yunus and Grameen Bank are appealing the decision, claiming Yunus' removal was politically motivated.

Alfred Brendel

2014-06-28T10:14:00.000+03:00

Alfred Brendel KBE (born 5 January 1931) is an Austrian pianist, poet, and author. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest pianists of all time.

Brendel was born in Wiesenberg (now Loučná nad Desnou, Czech Republic) to a non-musical family. They moved to Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), when Brendel was six, and later to Graz, Austria. Towards the end of World War II, the 14-year old Brendel was sent back to Yugoslavia to dig trenches. Brendel began piano lessons when he was six with Sofija Deželić, and later studied piano with Ludovica von Kaan at the Graz Conservatory and composition with Artur Michel.

After the war, Brendel composed music, as well as continuing to play the piano, to write and to paint. However, he never had more formal piano lessons and, although he attended master classes with Edwin Fischer and Eduard Steuermann, he was largely self-taught after the age of six.

Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz at the age of 17. He called it "The Fugue in Piano Literature", and as well as fugal works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt, it included a sonata of Brendel's own composition. However, he gave up composing shortly after this to concentrate on the piano. In 1949 he won a prize in the Ferruccio Busoni Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy and moved to Vienna the following year.

At the age of 21, in 1952, he made his first record, Franz Liszt's Weihnachtsbaum (that work's world premiere recording). His first concerto recording, Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 5 had happened the year before. He went on to make a string of other records, including three complete sets of the Ludwig van Beethoven piano sonatas (one on Vox Records and two on Philips Records). He was the first performer to record the complete solo piano works of Beethoven. He has also recorded works by Liszt, Brahms (including Brahms' concertos), Robert Schumann and particularly Franz Schubert. An important collection of Alfred Brendel is the complete Mozart piano concertos recorded with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, which is included in the Philips 180 CD complete Mozart Edition.

Brendel recorded extensively for the Vox label, providing them his first of three sets of the complete Beethoven sonatas. His breakthrough came after a recital of Beethoven at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the day after which three major record labels called his agent. Around this time he moved to Hampstead, London, where he still resides. Since the 1970s, Brendel has recorded for Philips Classics Records. One of the most successful pianists internationally, he completed many tours in Europe, the United States, South America, Japan and Australia. He had a particularly close association with the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but played regularly with all major orchestras in the US and elsewhere. Brendel has performed many cycles of the Beethoven Sonatas and Concertos, and was one of the few pianists who, in later years, could continue to fill large halls.

Brendel has been married twice. His first marriage, from 1960 to 1972, was to Iris Heymann-Gonzala, and they had a daughter, Doris. In 1975, Brendel married Irene Semler, and the couple have three children; a son, Adrian, who is a cellist, and two daughters, Katharina and Sophie.

In April 2007, Brendel was one of the initial signatories of the "Appeal for the Establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations".

In 2009, Brendel was featured in the award-winning German-Austrian documentary Pianomania, about a Steinway & Sons piano tuner, which was directed by Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis. The film premiered theatrically in North America, where it was met with positive reviews by The New York Times, as well as in Asia and throughout Europe, and is a part of the Goethe-Institut catalogue.

In November 2013 Brendel was the guest for BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. His choices were Handel's "Al lampo dell' armi (from Giulio Cesare), Bach's Piano Concerto No. 5 in F minor, BWV 1056 (2nd movement), Mozart's "Zeffiretti lusinghieri" (from Idomeneo), Joseph Haydn's String Quartet in D major, (Op. 20/4) (4th movement), Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 (1st movement), Franz Schubert's String Quartet No. 13 in A minor (3rd movement), Mahler's "Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht" (from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) and Schoenberg's String Trio, Op. 45.

Brendel is regarded as one of the major interpreters of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. He played relatively few 20th century works, but is closely associated with Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Concerto. Toward the end of his concert career he stopped playing some of the most physically demanding pieces in the repertoire, such as the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven, owing to problems with arthritis.

Critical reaction to Brendel's playing has been mixed. While he has been lauded by Michael Steinberg as "the new Schnabel", critic Harold C. Schonberg noted that some critics and specialists accused the pianist of "pedanticism". Brendel's playing is sometimes described as being "cerebral", and he has said that he believes the primary job of the pianist is to respect the composer's wishes without showing off himself, or adding his own spin on the music: "I am responsible to the composer, and particularly to the piece". As well as his former mentor and teacher, Edwin Fischer, he cites Alfred Cortot, Wilhelm Kempff, and the conductors Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler as particular influences.

Brendel has worked with younger pianists such as Paul Lewis, Till Fellner and, most recently, Kit Armstrong. He has also performed in concert and recorded with his son Adrian. and appeared in many Lieder recitals with Hermann Prey, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Matthias Goerne.

In November 2007, Brendel announced that he would retire from the concert platform after his concert of 18 December 2008 in Vienna, which featured him as soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat; the orchestra (the Vienna Philharmonic) was conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. His final concert in New York was at Carnegie Hall on 20 February 2008, with works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Since his debut at Carnegie Hall on 21 January 1973 he has appeared there 81 times, often in his own recital series, and in 1983 he became only the second pianist to perform the complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas at the Hall, a feat he repeated in 1993 (Artur Schnabel was the first in 1936; after Brendel, Maurizio Pollini performed the cycle in 1995/1996, and Daniel Barenboim did so in 2003).

Next to music, literature is Brendel's second life and occupation. His writings have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. For several years, he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include:

– Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (Essays) (1976)

– Music Sounded Out (1990) – essays, including "Must Classical Music be Entirely Serious?"

– One Finger Too Many (Poetry) (1998)

– Alfred Brendel on Music (collected essays) (2001)

– Me, of All People: Alfred Brendel in Conversation with Martin Meyer (2002) (UK edition: The Veil of Order)

– Cursing Bagels (Poetry) (2004)

– Playing the Human Game (collected poems) (2010) Phaidon Press

– A Pianist's A–Z: A Piano Lover's Reader. Faber & Faber. 2013. ISBN 978-0571301843.

Thomas C. Südhof

2014-06-28T10:08:00.004+03:00

Thomas Christian Südhof (born December 22, 1955) is a German-American biochemist well known for his study of synaptic transmission. Currently, he is a professor in the School of Medicine in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, and by courtesy in Neurology, and in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

He is the co-awardee of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with James Rothman and Randy Schekman) for work on vesicle trafficking.

A German native, Südhof was born in Göttingen in 1955. He spent his childhood in Göttingen and Hannover, and was a graduate from the Hannover Waldorf School in 1975. Südhof studied medicine at the RWTH Aachen University, Harvard University, and then the University of Göttingen where, in 1982, he obtained his M.D. The same year, Südhof finished work on his doctoral thesis, in which he described the structure and function of chromaffin cells, at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in the lab of Victor P. Whittaker. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship in Whittaker’s lab, Südhof moved to the United States in 1983, where he began postdoctoral training in the department of molecular genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center (now the UT Southwestern Medical Center) in Dallas, Texas, under the supervision of Michael Stuart Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein.

During his postdoctoral fellowship, Südhof worked to describe the role of the LDL receptor in cholesterol metabolism, for which Brown and Goldstein were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985. Südhof finished his postdoctoral training in 1986 and was made an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was also given his own laboratory at UT Southwestern Medical Center where he focused on the Presynaptic Neuron for over 20 years.

In 2008, Südhof moved to Stanford University and is currently the Avram Goldstein Professor in the School of Medicine as well as a Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology, Psychiatry, and Neurology.

He ascribed his powers of analysis and concentration to boyhood lessons with his bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher.

Thomas C. Südhof laid the foundations for his scientific career studying the synapse early while studying the mechanisms of neurotransmitter dependent hormone release from neuroendocrine cells for his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Südhof described the structure and function of chromaffin cells which are responsible for the release of epinephrine, norepinephrine and endorphins from the medulla of the adrenal gland. Innervated by sympathetic nervous system, chromaffin cells are important in the initiation of the fight-or-flight response of animals when exposed to threatening stimuli.

After completing his thesis in 1983, Südhof moved to UT Southwestern Medical Center for his postdoctoral training where he began researching in the department of molecular genetics under the supervision of Joseph L. Goldstein and Michael Stuart Brown. While a postdoctoral fellow, Südhof cloned the gene for the low-density lipoprotein receptor and, soon after, was able to explain its transcriptional regulation by cholesterol. When LDL receptors, found concentrated in the liver, bind specific free blood cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein, they are internalized and recycled removing the cholesterol from circulation. This process is a primary source of blood cholesterol regulation and variations in its efficiency were shown to be present in familial hypercholesterolemia. As a result of the discovery, LDL receptor function had also elucidated the principle of receptor-mediated endocytosis—a now universally understood process in cell biology. Goldstein and Brown were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery in 1985.

After finishing postdoctoral training, Thomas Südhof started his own laboratory at UT Southwestern in 1986. Briefly continuing work with Goldstein and Brown, Südhof helped identify a DNA element in the LDL gene that produced sterol mediated end-product repression when inserted in a viral promoter. This domain, known as a sterol regulatory sequence, directly participates in the regulation of sterol biosynthesis. Sterols are a major class of biomolecule and critical for life. Important sterols in humans include cholesterol and steroid hormones. Discovery of sterol regulatory elements and LDL receptor function led to the subsequent development of statin derived cholesterol medications such as atorvastatin (Lipitor)—the top-selling branded pharmaceutical drug in the world in 2008.

As he began working independently, what made Südhof’s research so unique was his focus on the presynaptic neuron. Until Südhof began his work, majority of neuroscience research was aimed at the postsynaptic neuron and its role in learning and memory. Indeed, Thomas Südhof is credited with discovering much of the machinery mediating neurotransmitter release and presynaptic plasticity in his 21 years at UT Southwestern. Südhof began with the discovery of synaptotagmins and their role in neurotransmitter release from the presynaptic neuron. Synaptotagmin, a transmembrane protein found in neurosecretory vesicles, functions as a calcium sensor triggering vesicle fusion and neurotransmitter release. Stimulation of a neuron results in an increase in intracellular calcium concentration. After binding calcium ion to a region in its cytosolic domain, vesicular synaptotagmin promotes quick or slow neurotransmitter release from the presynaptic neuron via interaction with regulatory and fusion related proteins such as members of the SNARE complex. Südhof also discovered RIMs and Muncs (most notably Munc13 and Munc18), soluble proteins which aid in the fusion of neurotransmitter vesicles to the nerve cell membrane and play an important role in synaptic plasticity. In addition, Südhof’s research uncovered the role of many other proteins facilitating vesicle binding, fusion, and resultant neurotransmitter release from the presynaptic neuron, including members of the SNARE complex: synaptobrevin, in the vesicular membrane, syntaxin, in the cell membrane, and SNAP25, which is tethered to the cytosolic side of the cell membrane via cysteine-linked palmitoyl chains and holds the complex of four helices together. Südhof was also responsible for elucidating the action of tetanus and botulinum toxins, which selectively cleave synaptobrevin and SNAP25, respectively, inhibiting vesicle fusion with the presynaptic membrane.

More recently, Thomas Südhof’s work has focused on aspects of synaptogenesis and maintenance of the synaptic connection. Südhof discovered neurexins, present on presynaptic neurons, and neuroligins, present on postsynaptic neurons, that come together to form a physical protein bridge across the synapse. The diversity in types of neurexins and neuroligins allows for a variety of unique binding opportunities between neurons and impart a specificity to synaptic connections. In additional studies, Südhof identified mutations in these proteins as a factor in inherited autism.

Thomas Südhof currently continues work on the presynaptic neuron and related topics in his laboratory at Stanford University. Yet to be determined is the mechanism by which neurexins and neuroligins locate each other to form the synapse, their transcriptional regulation, and control of their variability. Südhof’s research has not only given the scientific community a great understanding of the processes underlying synaptic transmission, but has also advanced medical knowledge of mechanisms behind poorly understood diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Schizophrenia, and Autism. He is currently working with a diverse group of researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to develop mouse models for mutants of synaptic genes. The project aims to drastically advance our understanding of neurological disorders. He also serves on the Research Consortium of Cure Alzheimer's Fund.

Felicity Lott

2014-06-28T09:54:00.000+03:00

Dame Felicity Ann Emwhyla Lott, DBE, FRAM, FRCM (born 8 May 1947) is an English soprano.

Lott was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. From her earliest years she was musical, having started studying piano at age 5. She also played violin and began singing lessons at 12. She is an alumna of Royal Holloway, University of London, obtaining a BA in French and Latin in 1969. During her year in France as part of her four year degree course, from 1967–68 she took singing lessons at the conservatory in Grenoble. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, winning the Principal's Prize.

She made her debut in 1975 as Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute at the English National Opera. In 1976 she appeared in the premiere of Henze's We Come to the River at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and began a long relationship with the Glyndebourne Festival.

She has been associated with the works of Richard Strauss including various lieder, the Four Last Songs and the roles of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier and the Countess in Capriccio. She has also appeared in operettas, singing the title role in Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow at Glyndebourne, as well as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus and the title roles in Offenbach's La belle Hélène and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein'.

She has a special love for French "mélodies", German "Lieder" and the English song repertoire, particularly the songs of Benjamin Britten. She is a founding member of Songmakers' Almanac. Her accompanist since her student days has been Graham Johnson, and they have given a great number of recitals together. She also has performed duet recitals with mezzo-soprano Ann Murray, baritone Thomas Allen and Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager. She is also featured as a soloist in a recording of the Mozart Requiem in D Minor with the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra.

Felicity Lott has received many honorary doctorates, including the Universities of Oxford, London, Leicester, Sussex, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow and the Sorbonne in Paris. She has been elected to the French Legion of Honor and made a DBE in 1996. She sang at the wedding of HRH Prince Andrew in 1986. In 2003 Dame Felicity was awarded the title of Bayerische Kammersängerin. She is Vice-President of British Youth Opera and The Bach Choir.

In autumn 2009 it was announced that she had been appointed a Visiting Professor by Royal Holloway having previously been appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college.

On 9 February 2010, she was presented with The Wigmore Hall Medal by HRH The Duke of Kent KG, at the launch of the hall's 110th anniversary programme. The medal was introduced in 2006 and is awarded to internationally important artistic figures in recognition of their significant contribution to Wigmore Hall. The two previous recipients are Matthias Goerne and András Schiff. The citation praised her “unique contribution to Wigmore Hall and to the advancement of the song recital as a concert-going experience throughout the world.” It was 35 years since she first performed there in 1975.

She is a Patron of Bampton Classical Opera and the British Voice Association.

She is married to the actor Gabriel Woolf; they have a daughter, Emily (b. 1984).

Arieh Warshel

2014-06-28T09:48:00.002+03:00

Arieh Warshel (born November 20, 1940) is an Israeli and American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

Born in 1940 in kibbutz Sde Nahum, Mandatory Palestine (now in Israel). Served in the Israeli Armored Corps. After serving the Israeli Army (final rank Captain), Warshel attended the Technion, Haifa, where he received his BSc degree in Chemistry, Summa Cum Laude, in 1966. Subsequently, he earned both MSc and PhD degrees in Chemical Physics (in 1967 and 1969, respectively), with Shneior Lifson, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. After his PhD, he did postdoctoral work at Harvard University until 1972, and from 1972 to 1976 he returned to the Weizmann Institute and worked for the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England. In 1976 he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at USC. He was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

As a soldier, he fought in both the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, attaining the rank of captain in the IDF.

Warshel is known for his work on computational biochemistry and biophysics, in particular for pioneering computer simulations of the functions of biological systems, and for developing what is known today as Computational Enzymology. He is a member of many scientific organisations, most importantly:

Elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (2009)

Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2008)

Fellow of the Biophysical Society (2000)

Alfred P. Sloan fellow (1978)

Arieh Warshel made major contributions in introducing computational methods for structure function correlation of biological molecules, pioneering and co-pioneering programs, methods and key concepts for detailed computational studies of functional properties of biological molecules using Cartesian-based force field programs, the combined Quantum Chemistry/Molecular mechanics (i.e., QM/MM) method for simulating enzymatic reactions, the first molecular dynamics simulation of a biological process, microscopic electrostatic models for proteins, free energy perturbation in proteins and other key advances. It was for the development of these methods that Warshel shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.