Word: ansermet
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Pain & Pleasure. Both Furtwängler and his fellow essayist, Swiss Conductor Ertiest Ansermet (who called his 34-page opus Musical Experience and the Modern World), had played their share of contemporary music, Furtwängler dutifully, Ansermet enthusiastically. Yet both found that conducting it, like listening to it, had sometimes been more pain than pleasure...
Bearded Conductor Ansermet, who had introduced and championed much of the music of his friend Igor Stravinsky, seemed to agree on some of it with an early Stravinsky critic, Claude Debussy, who had said to Ansermet years ago: "You know how much I admire Petrouchka, but The Rite of Spring disturbs me. It seems to me that Stravinsky is trying to make music out of something that is not music, just like the Germans . . . tried to make breakfasts out of sawdust...
Mozart: Symphony No. 38, K. 504 (L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet conducting; English Decca, 6 sides). Conductor Ansermet, a champion of new music, proves with the great "Prague" symphony that he is also a master of the old. Recording: excellent...
Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms (the London,Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, Ernest Ansermet conducting; English Decca, 6 sides). In his first successful concert work for chorus and orchestra,* written in 1930, Stravinsky shows that he knows how to use voices as well as instruments with pungency, economy and originality. Fellow composers, in & out of Hollywood, have borrowed from it. Performance: excellent. Recording: excellent...
...Concertgebouw learned many a score under the baton of the composer himself-Strauss, Mahler, Hindemith-and many more under guest experts like Pierre Monteux, Ernest Ansermet (TIME, Feb. 2), Bruno Walter. For 45 of its 60 years it felt the sure hand of the same good conductor, Willem Mengelberg. Among his innovations were the great annual Easter performances of Bach's St. Matthew Passion and foreign tours for which the Concertgebouw is famed...