Word: batonless
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...goes without saying that Ozawa conducted the symphony without a score, and indeed his capacity for memorizing works is one of the great wonders of the conducting world. He displayed his natural and fluid podium style; conducting batonless and swaying hypnotically with the music, his sweeping horizontal gestures moved the half-hour first movement Andante comodo along. He chose his tempi with the utmost of care; the opening movement was convincingly played, its construction logically laid out, its peaks ecstatic and its valleys expansive. When one thinks of all the great conductors who have left recordings of the work?...
True, Ms. Mutter was strapless, playing the violin in a gun-metal gray dress, and Mr. Ozawa was batonless, conducting as if summoning some ancient rain spirit. But these were the few rare unconventional elements of BSO's February 8th performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D, Opus 61 and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, pictures from pagan Russia...
Hovahness's Concerto No.8 for Orchestra and his "Prayer of St. Gregory" were accentuated in their grandeur by the presence of their creator. Batonless, the octagenarian composer himself conducted the former work. The orchestra, which seems at its best with the Baroque, carried the piece's modernist Eastern European theme well. Hovahness's Slavic exoticism recalls Mussorgsky and Stravinsky...
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