Day: February 9, 2024
The University of the People, a tuition-free online university, was founded in 2009 and accredited in 2014. The game-changing goal of the U.S. nonprofit is to make education accessible to some 140,000 students from 200 countries. Maxim Adams has the story. Video: Dana Preobrazhenskaya.
…
TOKYO — Seiji Ozawa, the Japanese conductor who amazed audiences with the lithe physicality of his performances during three decades at the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has died, his management office said Friday. He was 88.
The internationally acclaimed maestro, with his trademark mop of salt-and-pepper hair, led the BSO from 1973 to 2002, longer than any other conductor in the orchestra’s history. From 2002 to 2010, he was the music director of the Vienna State Opera.
He died of heart failure Tuesday at his home in Tokyo, according to his office, Veroza Japan.
He remained active in his later years, particularly in his native land. He was the artistic director and founder of the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival, a music and opera festival in Japan. He and the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1984, won the Grammy for best opera recording in 2016 for Ravel’s “L’Enfant et Les Sortileges” (“The Child and the Spells”).
In 2022, he conducted his Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival for the first time in three years to mark its 30th anniversary. That turned out to be his last public performance.
Ozawa exerted enormous influence over the BSO during his tenure. He appointed 74 of its 104 musicians and his celebrity attracted famous performers including Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. He also helped the symphony become the biggest-budget orchestra in the world, with an endowment that grew from less than $10 million in the early 1970s to more than $200 million in 2002.
When Ozawa conducted the Boston orchestra in 2006 — four years after he had left — he received a hero’s welcome with a nearly six-minute ovation.
Ozawa was born Sept. 1, 1935, to Japanese parents in Manchuria, China, while it was under Japanese occupation.
After his family returned to Japan in 1944, he studied music under Hideo Saito, a cellist and conductor credited with popularizing Western music in Japan. Ozawa revered him and formed the Saito Kinen (Saito Memorial) Orchestra in 1984 and eight years later founded the Saito Kinen Festival — renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival in 2015.
Ozawa first arrived in the United States in 1960 and was quickly hailed by critics as a brilliant young talent. He attended the Tanglewood Music Center and was noticed by Leonard Bernstein, who appointed him assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic for the 1961-62 season. After his New York debut with the Philharmonic at age 25, The New York Times said “the music came brilliantly alive under his direction.”
He directed various ensembles including the San Francisco Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra before beginning his tenure in Boston in 1970.
At the time there were few nonwhite musicians on the international scene. Ozawa embraced the challenge and it became his lifelong passion to help Japanese performers demonstrate they could be first-class musicians. In his 1967 book “The Great Conductors,” critic Harold C. Schonberg noted the changing ranks of younger conductors, writing that Ozawa and Indian-born Zubin Mehta were the first Asian conductors “to impress one as altogether major talents.”
Ozawa had considerable star quality and crossover appeal in Boston, where he was a well-known fan of the Red Sox and Patriots sports teams. In 2002, Catherine Peterson, executive director of Arts Boston, a nonprofit group that markets Boston’s arts, told The Associated Press that “for most people in this community, Seiji personifies the Boston Symphony.”
Ozawa is largely credited with elevating the Tanglewood Music Center, a music academy in Lenox, Massachusetts, to international prominence. In 1994, a 1,200-seat, $12 million music hall at the center was named for him.
His work at Tanglewood was not without controversy. In 1996, as music director of the orchestra and its ultimate authority, he decided to move the respected academy in new directions. Ozawa ousted Leon Fleisher, the longtime director of Tanglewood, and several prominent teachers quit in protest.
Despite glowing reviews for his performances in Europe and Japan, American critics were increasingly disappointed in the later years of his tenure with the BSO. In 2002, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that Ozawa had become, after a bold start, “an embodiment of the entrenched music director who has lost touch.”
Many of the orchestra’s musicians agreed and even circulated an anti-Ozawa newsletter claiming he had worn out his welcome in Boston.
Ozawa won two Emmy awards for TV work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra — the first in 1976 for the BSO’s PBS series “Evening at Symphony” and the second in 1994, for Individual Achievement in Cultural Programming, for “Dvorak in Prague: A Celebration.”
Ozawa held honorary doctorates of music from the University of Massachusetts, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. He was one of five honorees at the annual Kennedy Center Honors in 2015 for contributing to American culture through the arts.
In later years, Ozawa’s health deteriorated. He was treated for cancer of the esophagus in 2010, and in 2015 and 2016 he canceled performances for various health problems.
Ozawa’s management office said his funeral was attended only by close relatives as his family wished to have a quiet farewell.
He cancelled some appearances in 2015-16 for health reasons, including what would have been his first return to the Tanglewood music festival — the summer home of the Boston symphony — in a decade.
…
SAN FRANCISCO — A bounty of 10 African penguin chicks has hatched in just over a year at a San Francisco science museum as part of an effort to conserve the endangered bird.
The penguins began hatching in November 2022, ending a four-year period without any new chicks, and continued through January of this year, the California Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday.
African penguins have dwindled to 9,000 breeding pairs in the wild, the academy said in a statement.
Threats such as overfishing, habitat degradation and oil spills have reduced colonies of the charismatic black-and-white birds, said Brenda Melton, director of animal care and well-being at the museum’s Steinhart Aquarium.
“Every chick we welcome strengthens the genetics and overall population of the species in human care,” she said.
Chicks spend their first three weeks with their penguin parents in a nest box. They then attend “fish school,” where they learn to swim on their own and eat fish provided by biologists. Once ready, they are introduced to the colony.
The 21 penguins at the museum in Golden Gate Park have distinct personalities and are identifiable by their flipper bands, according to the academy’s website.
Opal is the oldest and, at age 36, has perfected the ability to catch fish in mid-air. Her partner, Pete, is a messy eater and a flirt.
Partners Stanlee and Bernie, who both like to bray, produced four of the 10 chicks, including Fyn, named for a type of vegetation found on the southern tip of Africa. Fyn is the youngest on exhibit and older sister to Nelson and Alice, both hatched in November.
Fyn often runs up to biologists when they enter the habitat and shakes her head at them — typical courtship behavior that chicks and juveniles commonly display toward people who have cared for them since hatching.
The youngest chick hatched January 12, and its sex has not yet been determined.
African penguins can live to be 27 years old in the wild, and longer in captivity.
…
vancouver, british columbia — The Canadian government is delaying access to medically assisted death for people with mental illness.
Those suffering from mental illness were supposed to be able to access Medical Assistance in Dying — also known as MAID — starting March 17. The recent announcement by the government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the second delay after original legislation authorizing the practice passed in 2021.
The delay came in response to a recommendation by a majority of the members of a committee made up of senators and members of Parliament.
One of the most high-profile proponents of MAID is British Columbia-based lawyer Chris Considine. In the mid-1990s, he represented Sue Rodriguez, who was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS.
Their bid for approval of a medically assisted death was rejected at the time by the Supreme Court of Canada. But a law passed in 2016 legalized euthanasia for individuals with terminal conditions. From then until 2022, more than 45,000 people chose to die.
Considine said he was in favor of postponing an extension of the law to those with mental illness because depression can have numerous reasons, such as poor housing or job prospects. He pointed to the difficulty many people face in getting timely psychiatric help.
He said pressure for the delay came from numerous parts of Canadian society.
“I think that there was pressure from a number of sources, including provincial governments in Canada, a number of them who felt that they could not provide the funding nor the resources for persons who are depressed to receive access to health care professionals, such as psychologists and psychiatrists,” he said.
Pamela Wallin, a former journalist, was one of three senators in the minority on the parliamentary committee. She told VOA that medical experts say they are ready, but not the politicians. She feels continuing the delay is cruel.
“But if you have a mental illness, no, no, no. We’ve already made you work and wait for three years on this, and we promised you it would be ready,” she said. “But now we’re going to make you wait another three years while we think about it some more. I’m just appalled that we would do this to people who are suffering in ways that many of us can’t even understand.”
Sally Thorne, a professor emeritus of nursing at the University of British Columbia, said if mentally ill people wish to apply for medical assistance in their deaths, they have to meet all the current requirements for people with physical ailments whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable but who have chronic and life-limiting conditions.
These requirements include evaluations by multiple doctors, including a specialist in a patient’s particular condition, being offered other methods of treatment, and a 90-day waiting period.
Thorne said she was not worried about the argument that those with mental disorders lack the ability to give consent.
“Because such people do, in our society, buy a house or sign consent for cardiac surgery or something like that. We do as a society understand that there’s a difference between having a mental illness and having the capacity to provide informed consent,” she said.
Thorne said it was an interesting paradox that those with mental illness who also have qualifying physical conditions can legally access medical assistance in dying.
Arthur Schafer, the founding director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, said the pressure for the latest pause was entirely expected and was misguided.
“I think when people are asking their opinion when the general public is there, assuming, ‘Hey, if you’re mentally ill, you won’t really know what you want, or you won’t be capable, or you may be temporarily depressed, and that makes you vulnerable.’ But that isn’t what will happen,” he said.
Nicole Scheidl, the executive director of Ottawa-based Physicians for Life, who is strongly opposed to euthanasia, said the idea of extending MAID to cover mental health sufferers should be abandoned permanently.
“Frankly, I think they should drop it,” she said. “I don’t see how there’s any medical evidence to show that they can produce clinical practical guidelines, practice guidelines, that would be useful.”
The Trudeau government has announced the delay will last until at least 2027. This will move the issue until after the next federal election, which must happen no later than October 20, 2025.
…