OBITUARIES.(Giuseppi Sinopoli; Robert Starer; Graziella Sciutti; John Ardoin; Ninette De Valois)(Obituary)

GIUSEPPE SINOPOLI, Venice, Italy, November 2, 1946 -- Berlin, Germany, April 21, 2001

The conductor/composer suffered a heart attack while conducting a performance of Aida at Deutsche Oper. He was pronounced dead early the next morning at the German Heart Center in Berlin.

A man of wide-ranging enthusiasms and accomplishments, Sinopoli completed a medical degree before beginning his musical career in the early 1970s. He remained passionately interested in extra-musical studies for the rest of his life, frequently writing on psychoanalysis, anthropology, spirituality and philosophy. Earlier this year, he completed degree studies in archaeology, with Egyptology as his specialty, at Rome University. He was to have been awarded his diploma on April 23.

In 1972, when he was still in his twenties, Sinopoli joined the composition faculty of his alma mater, the Venice Conservatory. Six years later, he made his New York debut as a composer with a Juilliard School performance of his orchestral/vocal piece, Souvenirs a la Memoire. His most celebrated composition was probably the opera Lou Salome, the story of a free-spirited female psychoanalyst, which had its premiere at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 1981, but he also created works for orchestra, electronics, voice and chamber ensemble.

As a conductor, Sinopoli made a specialty of broad, expansive readings of Mahler, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Verdi and Puccini at such houses as Deutsche Oper, Wiener Staatsoper, Salzburg and Covent Garden. He was chief conductor of the St. Cecilia Academy Orchestra (1983-87), music director of the Philharmonia Orchestra, London (1987-95), and director of the Dresden Staatskapelle Orchestra. The first of his many appearances with the New York Philharmonic was in 1982, leading the Mahler Sixth, and he bowed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1985, conducting the first performances of Franco Zeffirelli's production of Tosca. His Bayreuth debut was in 1985, leading Tannhauser. He conducted Jurgen Flimm's production of the Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 2000 and was scheduled to repeat the assignment this summer. The opera titles in his substantial catalogue of recordings include Salome, Elektra, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Nabucco for Deutsche Grammophon, and Carmen and Die Frau ohne Schatten for Teldec.

The April 20 Aida at which Sinopoli was stricken was the conductor's first performance at Deutsche Oper since 1990, when he refused the position of the company's general music director after a disagreement with DO general director Gotz Friedrich. Ironically, the performance was dedicated to the memory of Friedrich, who died last December.

ROBERT STARER, Vienna, Austria, January 8, 1924 -- Kingston, New York, April 22, 2001