Word: basses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young man in slacks and sport shirt planted his stocking feet beside the microphone, began bleating plaintively, picking a lackadaisical guitar. At his back were five other musicians - pianist, bass fiddler and three more guitarists - all working without written music. Sang the fellow in stocking feet...
...huge (200 ft.) stage in near darkness. But even traditionalists had to admit that the result of it all was a Parsifal of strong simplicity, rich with the mystery of its Grail theme. Conductor Hans Knappertsbusch and the orchestra gave a faultless musical performance, and young (30) U.S. Bass-Baritone George London sang a magnificent Amfortas. Glowed Wagner Biographer Ernest Newman, 82, critic of the London Sunday Times and a Bayreuth regular for half a century: "The most beautiful Parsifal I have ever seen. I will never go to Covent Garden for it again. I will only see it here...
...season, Bayreuth will be pure Wagner, with a good many newcomers among the performers. Unlike Furtwängler, neither of the Wagner conductors, Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan, has ever held the festival podium before. Among the new singers: Met Soprano Astrid Varnay (Brünhilde) and U.S. Bass-Baritone George London (Amfortas in Parsifal), who has been a postwar star of the Vienna State Opera (TIME...
...Great Dream. At 17, "Koussy" left his home town of Vyshny-Volochek to study the bass fiddle in Moscow. Soon he was playing with the Imperial Opera orchestra, toured on the side for ten years as a soloist. Not content with his specialized fame as the world's greatest virtuoso performer on the double bass, he began conducting in Germany, England and France. In 1909, already rich* and respected, he went back to Russia to head the Imperial Music Society's concerts in St. Petersburg. His reputation as a conductor spread throughout Russia, but in 1920 he fled...
Died. Serge Koussevitzky, 76, Russian bass-fiddle virtuoso turned conductor, who made the Boston Symphony one of the world's best, became the guiding light of the famed Tanglewood Music Festival; of a cerebral hemorrhage; in Boston (see Music...