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 FridayÌýÌýÌý16:00-16:30
SundayÌý20:30-21:00Ìý(rpt)
Radio 4's weekly obituaries programme |
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This week |
FridayÌý27thÌýApril 2007
(Rpt) SundayÌý29th April |
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Mstislav Rostropovich
Musician who has diedÌýat the age of 80.
Rostropovich was born in Azerbijan in 1927 and moved to Moscow as a child, taken by his parents who recognised musical brilliance in their five year old. He took up the cello when he was ten and after being taught by both Shostakovich and Prokofiev at the Moscow conservatory he quickly became a musical star in concert halls all round the world.
Then in 1978, his life changed when he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Rostropovich had provided shelter for Alexander Solzhenitsyn after the dissident writer was being harassed out of Moscow. That sense of solidarity was continually expressed throughout his career, perhaps most memorably when he played an impromptu concert at the foot of the Berlin Wall as it was torn down in 1989.
Two years later he flew to Moscow to the aid of another great Russian who died this week, Boris Yeltsin, who was desperately resisting the hardliners’ attempts to reverse the perestroika and glasnost reforms. Rostropovich spent several days protesting at the parliament building. His efforts were rewarded when his citizenship was restored and he returned to his beloved Russia.
John Wilson talks toÌýdirector of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Proms Nicholas Kenyon and to cellist Julian Lloyd Webber.
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David Halberstam
Journalist and author who has died aged 73.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam was one of the first reporters to file from the front line of the Vietnam War. He was later one of the first to argue in print that the United States was fighting a losing battle.
He wrote for the New York Times, returning to his native city in the early sixties after stints covering the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Tennessee. His postings in Vietnam also resulted in two acclaimed booksThe Making Of A QuagmireÌý andThe Best And The Brightest . Both won prizes and influenced American public opinion the 1960s.
John Wilson talks to another controversial prize winning reporter who made his name exposing the military quagmire of Vietnam – Seymour Hersh.
David Halberstam was born April 10th 1934. He died April 23rd 2007. |
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Calvin Lockhart
Actor who has died aged 72.
There can be few actors whose careers have spanned such a diversity of genres as Calvin Lockhart. In the early 1970s he lived out a dual identity on stage and screen. He played gangsters and DJs in a series of American blaxploitation movies and at the same time became one of the first black guest artists at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, sharing the stage with the likes of Janet Suzman and Corin Redgrave.
Born Bert Cooper in Nassau in 1934, he left the Bahamas to seek work in New York City in the early 50s. After juggling jobs as a carpenter and taxi driver with night-school acting classes, Bert Cooper re-emerged as Calvin Lockhart. It wasn’t long before he was working on Broadway, in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey alongside a mostly British cast which included Angela Lansbury and Joan Plowright. His varied career over the following years saw him starring alongside Peter Cushing in the horror film The Beast Must Die, followed by appearances on Starsky and Hutch, the soap series Dynasty and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.Ìý
John Wilson talksÌýto Sir Trevor Nunn who directed Calvin Lockhart in Titus AndronicusÌý with the RSC.
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Calvin Lockhart was born on September 18th 1934. He died March 29th 2007. |
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Poet Fred D’Aguiar who teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech reads his poem ElegyÌýreflecting on the massacre of 32 students and staff.
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