Conductor James Levine dies at 77
James Levine, one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors who served as music director for the Metropolitan Opera in New York for four decades before sexual abuse accusations prompted a messy exit, has died at age 77.
Dr. Len Horovitz, his personal physician, said Levine died on March 9 in Palm Springs, California, of “natural causes.”
The maestro, known for his wild hair and bespectacled face, was long revered by the Met’s audiences, singers and symphony-sized orchestra at America’s cathedral of opera whose standards he helped place among the highest in the world.
Levine, considered the foremost American conductor of his time and perhaps the most celebrated since Leonard Bernstein, led about 2,500 performances of more than 80 different operas since his Met debut in 1971, more than anyone else since it was founded in 1880. He also conducted some of the major orchestras of America and Europe, most notably the Munich Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
He stepped down as music director in 2016 after struggling with health problems, but was fired in 2018 from his reduced role with the Met after three men accused him of abusing them as teenagers as far back as 1968.
Levine and the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, reached an out-of-court settlement in 2019 resolving his lawsuit accusing the company of breach of contract and defamation and the company’s countersuit. The settlement gave him $3.5 million.
Peter Gelb, the Met general
manager who made the decision to part ways with Levine, called the outcome “a tragedy.” Levine called the accusations “unfounded” and said he was not “an oppressor or an aggressor.”
Levine worked with the greatest opera singers of his era including Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Renee Fleming, Jessye Norman and Kiri Te Kanawa, among many others.
“He is one of the greatest artists of all time. He has created one of the greatest orchestras in modern history. He may be one of the greatest opera conductors who ever lived,” Gelb told The New York Times in 2011.
Levine was respected for his conducting abilities, his penchant for eliciting the finest performances from musicians and his endless enthusiasm.
A traditionalist, he conducted sparkling performances of venerable operas by Verdi, Mozart, Puccini, Rossini and Wagner, as well as new compositions. A piano prodigy, Levine remained active as a keyboard recitalist. He worked to create an exceptional rapport with his musicians. (Reuters)
BERLIN (Reuters) – The German government’s council of economic advisers said on Wednesday it expected Europe’s largest economy to shrink by roughly 2% in the first quarter of this year due to lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.
The council cut its forecast for fullyear 2021 gross domestic product growth to 3.1% from 3.7% previously. It expects the economy to reach its precrisis level at the turn of the year 2021/22 and to grow by 4% next year.
“The biggest downside risk remains the development of the coronavirus pandemic. The question of how quickly the economy can get to normal mainly hinges on the vaccination progress,” the council said in a statement, giving the first official forecast for the impact in the first three months of the year.
Economists have warned that a decision by Germany and several other European countries to suspend AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine could delay progress in reaching herd immunity and postpone a much-hoped-for easing of lockdown measures needed for a robust recovery in the second quarter.
The European Union’s drug regulator is investigating the reports of blood clots, bleeding and low platelet counts, and will report its findings on Thursday. AstraZeneca has said a review of safety data had shown no evidence of an increased risk of clots.
Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said the economy was still divided, with manufacturers getting through the crisis relatively well and services suffering under coronavirus curbs.
“Rapid progress in vaccinations and the consistent use of rapid tests are two important factors in this phase of the pandemic so that we can allow the economy as a whole to recover,” Altmaier said.
Council member Veronika Grimm said the AstraZeneca shot was needed to speed up Germany’s already slow vaccination campaign.
In order for Germany to achieve the EU target of vaccinating 70% of the adult population by the end of September 2021, authorities must increase the number of daily shots given at vaccination centers by 50%, Grimm said.
“In addition, family doctors and specialists should be included in the vaccination process,” Grimm said. For this, the AstraZeneca vaccine is needed because it is easier to transport and store compared to shots which need unusually low temperatures along the delivery chain, she added.
In a worst case scenario in which the AstraZeneca shot was banned permanently, it could be replaced in the government’s vaccination plan only partially in the course of the year when other vaccines such as Johnson & Johnson’s should become available, Grimm said.
Yaphet Kotto was nominated for an Emmy for his performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in a 1976 TV film about Entebbe, the deadly raid in which Israeli commandos freed Jewish passengers taken prisoner during an airplane hijacking.
It was one of many notable roles for the actor, who died Sunday at 81, after a decadeslong career that included starring roles in Alien, Homicide: Life on the Street and Live and Let Die. He was the first Black actor to portray a Black James Bond villain.
Like Amin, Kotto had roots in Africa: his father was a Cameroonian immigrant to the United States who Kotto said was a descendant of that country’s royal family. He was also Jewish, like the passengers on the plane and the commandos who freed them.
In fact, Kotto said he was frequently bullied as a child because he was one of the few Jews in his neighborhood. And he said that if he had not discovered acting, he would have become a rabbi.
“Look at all the films I’ve made. People say, How did you do it?” he told Inside Hook, an online magazine, in 2019. “I say, “Do you realize how many movies I’ve made? No agent or manager got me those jobs! It’s my faith that’s gotten me everything.”
Kotto was born November 15, 1939, in New York City to Avraham Kotto – who had converted to Judaism as a young man in Cameroon – and Gladys Marie – a nurse who became Jewish before he was born – he wrote in a self-published autobiography, Royalty.
Raised in the Bronx, he said his religion caused him trouble. “It was rough coming up,” he told the Associated Press in 1994, according to a 1997 news story. “And then going to shul, putting a yarmulke on, having to face people who were primarily Baptists in the Bronx meant that on Fridays I was in some heavy fistfights.”
Acting was a refuge, and he was taking high-level theater classes as a teen. Landing his first screen roles in the mid-1960s, Kotto soon became a familiar face on television and in films. His role as the first Black villain in a James Bond movie came in 1973’s Live and Let Die, and in the 1990s, he played a detective on the seven-season Baltimore crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street.
At a time when few Black Jews had gained public notice, Kotto stood out. “Yaphet Kotto was one of the greats, actor, writer & screenwriter... but especially for me, one of the first highly visible Black Jews I ever knew of,” tweeted Black Jewish activist Amadi Lovelace on Monday night. “Hearing his story helped me find my way home. His memory will be a blessing.”
After Homicide ended in 2000, Kotto appeared on screen only once more, for a small part in a 2008 movie called Witless Protection.
Over the last two decades, he promoted a range of unusual and sometimes contradictory views, saying that he had been abducted by aliens, dismissing the danger of COVID-19 and sharing content associated with QAnon, the pervasive pro-Trump conspiracy theory. Last year, Kotto endorsed both Black Lives Matter and former US president Donald Trump. (He had also forcefully rejected the prospect of a Black man being cast as James Bond.) On Facebook, he suggested that he had embraced Jesus and quoted passages from the New Testament several times over the last year.
In the 2019 Inside Hook interview, Kotto had not indicated any religious change, although he said he now looked for the nearest deli rather than the local synagogue when he traveled. Instead, he said Judaism remained a lasting influence in his life.
“I still open every book I read from the back page to the front. [My father] instilled Judaism in me. Everything the Jewish religion stands for, from an African’s point of view, he left those things in me – especially things that had to do with the New Testament, which he was thoroughly, totally against. He said it was BS,” Kotto recalled to Inside Hook. “If it weren’t for him, I would have probably gone to hatred or violence or drugs or alcohol. I escaped all of those things because of Judaism.”
Kotto’s wife of 24 years, Tessie Sinahon, announced his death on Facebook on Monday night, saying he had died in the Philippines, where the couple had been living. “You played a villain [in] some of your movies but for me you’re a real hero and to a lot of people also,” she wrote. “A good man, a good father, a good husband and a decent human being, very rare to find.”
In addition to his wife, Kotto is survived by four daughters and two sons, including one who was a longtime police officer in the San Francisco Bay Area. (JTA)