Word: beecham
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...York Philharmonic rehearsal that he fell off the podium into the second violins. "Podiums," he said, picking himself up with a lordly air, "are expressly designed as a conspiracy to get rid of conductors." Or the time Fritz Reiner congratulated him on "a delightful evening spent with Mozart and Beecham." "Why," came the reply, "drag in Mozart?" Or the time he was visiting as an honored guest in Mexico City and was asked his opinion of the regular conductor of the Mexico City Opera. "You know what we do with a musician like that in England?'' he roared...
...composers as Dvorak, Smetana and Strauss to British concert halls. Perhaps no other conductor of his time performed Mozart with comparable fluency and grace, and few could equal him in his communion with those other 18th century masters, Haydn and Handel. But apart from being a conductor and impresario. Beecham had another important career-he was a gadfly committed to "a deadly, unstoppable and indefatigable campaign against the dry rot that one observes everywhere in this unhappy land." His coat of arms might have been emblazoned with his personal credo: "Improve the standards; clean out the muck...
Through it all, he was able to inspire an orchestra - even a second-rate one - with some of his own passion. The Beecham sound was always elegant, the tempos pliant and relaxed, the balance of the orchestra luminous and precise...
Sold with Hymns. "I was a perfect child," Sir Thomas once remarked. "Never spoke, never cried!" Presumably, the perfect child owed his disposition to the consumption of Beecham's Pills, a laxative invented by his grandfather, a Lancashire horse doctor. Eventually the sale of Beecham's Pills rose to a million a day with the aid of a hymn book circulated free of charge and containing a famous quatrain...
...last fortnight Colin Davis, 32, was named principal conductor of the Sadler's Wells Opera and invited by the ailing Sir Thomas Beecham, 81, to assist him at the Glyndebourne Festival. Said Beecham, majestically speaking of himself in the third person: "Sir Thomas hopes that un der these conditions nothing untoward will happen, and it gives him great pleasure to initiate a collaboration which, he trusts, will continue for many years." The appointment confirmed what Eng lish critics have been saying for more than a year: Davis is the most promising con ducting talent to appear in England since...