His friends — who call him Sandy — say that if he believes in something, he makes it happen — like Carnegie Hall's new education wing in its renovated "studio towers".
The project, known as the Studio Towers Renovation, will create new spaces for music education on the landmark building's upper floors and upgrade the concert hall's backstage areas.
The new education wing, which has been built inside the hall's old studio towers, reflects Carnegie's evolution from an old-line temple of music to something of a teacher of music, which now devotes more than a 10th of its operating budget to education programs.
"Almost from the beginning, it lost money," Mr. Gillinson said, adding that Carnegie first built the studio towers that are now being used for the education wing in the hopes that their rental income would allow the hall to support itself.
Perhaps the delay in installation is due to reluctance on the basis of pride, as the studio's tower's perceived foreign intervention in an undoubtedly Chinese issue.
Francis made fun of him for staying in his "ivory tower studio" and hiding his own martinis "in a coffee cup so nobody knows what you're really drinking".
They seized the building, held it for six hours and, when running out of ammunition, the last eight attackers destroyed it and sacrificed themselves using explosive charges, but they were unable to broadcast due to the cutting off of the audio lines from the main studio to the tower as soon as the station was seized.
Looking back now, from the third floor of an expensive new Sky Sports studio complex that towers over the tatty sprawl of warehouses that have housed it to date, Francis is happy with the way he handled the issue.
HONG XU / SUSAN CHAN Since Carnegie Hall is getting increasingly tightfisted about managing its various spaces (ask the longtime residents of the hall's tower studios, who are being evicted), the generous selection of "rental gigs" in which aspiring performers, usually helped out by friends or by a far-off academic institution, get to have their own Carnegie Hall début may not go on forever.
The last big one occurred in 2007, when the hall awarded the son-in-law of Sanford I. Weill, the board chairman at the time, a multimillion-dollar contract to renovate Carnegie's tower studios into rehearsal rooms and educational spaces.
