Word: baton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...second premiere, performed by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Thomas Schippers, was another matter. It was a cantata called Sept Répons des Ténèbres, and it impressively proved that Poulenc's last year, like his other 45 as a composer, was blessed with exalted days. In Sept Répons, Poulenc resolved the devotional strain that runs through much of his music; the composition is a hymn for Holy Week that, as a French critic said after Poulenc's death, "springs from a soul taken by an ideal...
Despite a slightly slow start, the first movement did not drag under Swoboda's baton, and the orchestra produced sounds with shapes totally absent in the performance of the Beethoven. The orchestra had a few problems: the strings sounded a little thin and scattered in the extreme upper register during the fourth movement, while the low woodwinds occasionally picked the wrong notes. But Swoboda and the orchestra did capture the excitement and variety of the larger forms within each movement, and the Brahms, which ended the program, mitigated the effects of the Beethoven...
...Baton...
...longer tenure than that of any other major conductor. He shares with Bernstein an unbounded confidence in his players (though none call him "Gene," as New York musicians call Bernstein "Lenny"); in rehearsals, he treats them with a firm but gentle hand. On the podium, he uses no baton and, with his right hand liberated, gives his deepest concentration to color and balance. Perhaps as a result, his tempos sometimes drift...
Leinsdorf uses no baton and conducts with a stiff and angular style. His dress coat reaches nearly to his ankles, and from the audience he looks like an aging seaman sending semaphore signals to some distant ship. The Boston has the longest season of all (50 weeks), including Tanglewood in the summer and-for the 92 members willing to play Viennese waltzes and champagne music-a stint with Arthur Fiedler's Boston Pops...