Word: baton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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James G. Floyd Jr. Baton Rouge...
...hall at the John F. Kennedy Center. A cheerful cherub of a man walked swiftly to the podium and smiled at the audience. His face was a pale Russian winter's landscape, his blue eyes shone mischievously. He turned toward his colleagues and, with a sturdy slash of his baton, launched into a high-speed, raucous overture that seemed to roil the Potomac. It was strictly show-biz razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show had not fared well on Broadway, and the music culled from it might have passed...
...Russian word for glory but Rostropovich's nickname, and it was a good way for the conductor to show Washington that he is as gifted with jazz as he is with Tchaikovsky. Rostropovich caught the spirit easily, bending his body into the music, shafting his cues with a vigorous baton, sculpting the shapes of sound with his left hand, now kneading, now pleading, now punching his fist to bring home a thunderous cluster of dissonance...
...insists that his players call him Slava, not maestro. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick to bathroom, then orchestra says, 'There go god with diarrhea.' I, with my work, make...
...determined to make himself a great conductor. "It was my first dream," he says. "If I play cello or piano, I make sound through instruments, but this instrument is not alive. A conductor must make very deep connection, not with instruments but people. He must use not only baton but also eyes, expression and, most important, his musical personality...