Saturday, 22 October 2022

Carly Simon Loses Both Sisters to Cancer: Broadway Composer Lucy Simon And Opera Singer Joanna Simon Die One Day Apart



By EJ Panaligan


From left: Lucy, Joanna and Carly Simon. Photo: Disney General Entertainment Con

Musician Carly Simon has lost both of her sisters, Lucy and Joanna, to cancer one day apart from each other. Lucy, known throughout her life and career as a composer on Broadway, died of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 82 on Thursday in her Piermont, N.Y. home. Joanna, the oldest of the sisters who was known as an opera singer, died of thyroid cancer at 85 on Wednesday, according to the New York Times.


During Lucy Simon’s Broadway career, she was nominated for a Tony award in Original Score for her work on the long-running musical “The Secret Garden.” Before she became a composer, she and Carly Simon started out as a folk act in Provincetown, Mass. billed as the Simon Sisters, and their recording of “Wynken, Blynken & Nod” reached No. 73 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964. in 1981, Lucy Simon won a Grammy with her husband David Levine in Best Recording for Children for “In Harmony,” winning the award again in 1983 for the album’s sequel.


More recently, Lucy Simon had contributed work to the musical “On Cedar Street,” based on the 2015 book “Our Souls at Night” with Victoria Clark directing, but her cancer battle forced her to step away from the project. She is survived by her husband David, her daughter Julie and former husband Christopher Knight, her sister Carly, grandchildren Sophie, Ben, Charlie and Evie.


Joanna Simon started performed regularly on opera and concert stages in 1962, when she made her debut at the New York City Opera as Mozart’s Cherubino. In 1972, she performed the titular role in the world premiere of Thomas Pasatieri’s “Black Widow” at the Seattle Opera, while in 1975 she performed the role of Pelagia in the world premiere of Robert Starer’s “The Last Lover” at the Caramoor Music Festival. Her singing career ran through until 1986, participating in numerous recordings along the way with orchestras, including performances with the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.


Joanna Simon sings Saint-Saëns' Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix (My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice) from his opera Samson and Delilah, on the Ed Sullivan Show, March 28, 1971. This was the last episode hosted by Ed Sullivan and Simon was his final guest. YouTube, click here!

Lucy and Joanna Simon’s deaths follow the death of brother Peter, the youngest of the four siblings who was a photographer. He died of cardiac arrest at the age of 71 in 2018 after a bout with cancer.


First published at Variety, October 21, 2022





Joanna Simon, Opera Singer from Famously Musical Family, Dies at 85



A renowned mezzo-soprano, she grew up alongside her younger sisters, Carly and Lucy, both of whom became singer-songwriters.


Joanna Simon performing at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1999. She was one of the best-known American opera 

singers to emerge in the 1960s. Credit...Photo: Steve J. Sherman


by Clay Risen


Joanna Simon, a smoky-voiced mezzo-soprano who grew up in a family loaded with musical talent, including her younger sisters Carly and Lucy, before forging an acclaimed career as an opera and concert singer, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 85.


Mary Ascheim, a first cousin of Ms. Simon’s, said the cause was thyroid cancer. Ms. Simon died in a hospital a day before Lucy Simon’s death at 82 at her home in Piermont, N.Y.


Ms. Simon was one of the best-known American opera singers to emerge in the 1960s, a time when arts funding was flush, audiences were full and gleaming new music palaces were opening, chief among them the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York.


Her easy grace and glamorous good looks made her a popular guest on television talk shows. She sang and sat for interviews on “The Tonight Show” and “The Dick Cavett Show,” and she was a featured performer on the last original telecast of “The Ed Sullivan Show” before it went off the air in 1971.


Joanna Simon as the cover girl for Stereo Review, October 1971.
Simon was featured in an article by journalist William Livingstone.

In her embrace of popular culture, Ms. Simon was not too far removed from her singer-songwriter sisters. Carly Simon achieved lasting fame in the early 1970s with pop hits like “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain.” Lucy Simon sang with Carly early on — they were billed as the Simon Sisters — and later found success as a composer. She received a Tony nomination in 1991 for best original score, for the musical “The Secret Garden.”


She continued her opera training in Vienna, then returned to New York to start her career.


The sisters occasionally crossed paths. Joanna sang backup on Carly’s album “No Secrets” (1972) and Lucy’s album “Lucy Simon” (1975), and Carly played guitar offstage during Joanna’s performance on “The Mike Douglas Show” in 1971. Carly wrote her own opera, “Romulus Hunt,” released as an album in 1993; it featured a character named Joanna, a mezzo-soprano.


The sisters grew up singing and playing music together and remained close as adults, avoiding the petty jealousies that often ensnare siblings engaged in similar careers.


“When Lucy was 16, I envied her hourglass figure,” Joanna Simon told The Toronto Star in 1985. “When Carly first became successful, I envied her first $200,000 check. But those feelings lasted for 20 minutes, and I didn’t dwell on them. I knew it was a given in the operatic world that very few achieved that kind of success. I never expected it, so I wasn’t disappointed.”


Ms. Simon in “Bomarzo” with New York City Opera in 1967, the year the opera, by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, had its debut. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in that opera. Credit...New York City Opera


Joanna Elizabeth Simon was born on Oct. 20, 1936, in Manhattan, the oldest child of Richard L. Simon, a publisher and founder of Simon & Schuster, and Andrea (Heinemann) Simon, a singer and homemaker. The family lived in Manhattan and, later, the Fieldston neighborhood of the Bronx.


The Simon children took to music early; Joanna could play piano at 6 years old. In high school she thought she would become an actress, though by college, at Sarah Lawrence (which Carly also later attended), she had switched to musical comedy. Then a voice coach encouraged her to consider opera.


Upon graduating in 1958 with a degree in literature, she continued her opera training in Vienna, then returned to New York to start her career.


Ms. Simon, who lived in Manhattan, married Gerald Walker, a novelist and editor at The New York Times Magazine, in 1976. He died in 2004. She dated Walter Cronkite until his death in 2009.


In addition to her sister Carly, she is survived by her stepson, David Walker, and a step-grandson. Her brother, Peter, a photojournalist, died in 2018.


Ms. Simon continued to sing professionally through the early 1980s, then gradually pulled back before retiring in 1986 to join “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS as a cultural correspondent. She won an Emmy Award in 1991 for a documentary on creativity and manic depression.


Funding for arts programming at “MacNeil/Lehrer” eventually dried up, and her position was cut. Casting about for a new career, she became a real-estate broker. Within six months, she told The Times in 1997, she had sold $6 million in property. She later became a vice president of her company, Fox Residential Group.


Joanna Simon arrives for the Vanity Fair 2007 Tribeca Film Festival party at the State Supreme Courthouse on April 24, 2007 in New York City. Evan Agostini/Getty Images For Tribeca Film Festival

While her musical background wasn’t the key to her newfound success, she said it sometimes came in handy.


“When I take customers into potential apartments, I go into the next apartment and vocalize,” she said. “If they can hear me, it’s no deal.”


Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of “Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey.”


First published at The New York Times, October 21, 2022








Wednesday, 12 October 2022

Vaughan Williams: Complicated, but Not Quite Conservative


The English composer deserves a fresh assessment as the world does (and doesn’t) observe the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Credit...Hulton-Deutsch Collection, via Getty Images

by David Allen

Oct. 12, 2022


Ralph Vaughan Williams understood what his fate was likely to be.

“Every composer cannot expect to have a worldwide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people,” Vaughan Williams, an Englishman, said in a series of lectures on folk music and nationalism at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. “Many young composers,” he went on, “make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local.”

There was a time when it seemed plausible that Vaughan Williams might become, if not exactly a universal composer, then at least something more than the countrymen he had described as “unappreciated at home and unknown abroad” in the 1912 essay “Who Wants the English Composer?”

Several of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies were staples in the United States in his lifetime, and from the depths of the Blitz around 1940 to the front-page news of his death in 1958, he was among the 20th-century composers that American orchestras played most. The New York Times critic Olin Downes even placed him near the summit of contemporary composition in 1954, though he feared that his “kinship to modern society” meant that “the music of the Englishman will age sooner than that of Sibelius with the passing of the period that bore it.”

So it seemed. When Harold Schonberg, Downes’s successor, argued in The Times in 1964 that “Vaughan Williams may turn out to be the most important symphonist of the century,” he did so while complaining that his scores were no longer performed, and alongside a report about how busy Benjamin Britten had become.

If Vaughan Williams’s music has since recovered in Britain after a period when it was the butt of modernist jokes — “The Lark Ascending” and “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” are routinely elected the favourite works of radio listeners there — the same has hardly been true elsewhere, even in this, the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Perhaps Aaron Copland’s judgment juin 1931, that Vaughan Williams was “the kind of local composer who stands for something great in the musical development of his own country but whose actual musical contribution cannot bear exportation,” was in the end right.

Credit...via Royal College of Music

IT IS AT THIS POINT in an essay on an arguably overlooked composer that a critic will often suggest that the judgment of history is wrong, explaining that new research shows that the subject, if renowned as a conservative, was in fact a progressive, deserving of a fresh assessment.


First published at The New York Times, October 12, 2022



Saturday, 1 October 2022

The sound of music - Michael Brown - manufacturer of Sophera speakers, Gunning NSW


Article by Michelle Hespe

Ross Gengos, owner of Abels Music, Canberra with his combination Sophera Transparent 1 Mid and High Frequency spheres (top) and the Sophera LH1 bass spheres underneath. Manufactured by Michael Brown at his Gunning NSW factory. Photo: Bob Dunn



First published in CEO Magazine, www.theceomagazine.com

Sophera speaker company, www.sophera.com.au