Word: beecham
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...city yet fully recovered from the blasts of Sir Thomas Beecham, who in 1941 had proclaimed Seattle "an esthetic dustbin" (he has similarly complimented many other U.S. cities...
Forcing onward on his U.S. tour (TIME, Jan. 4), Britain's doughty Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, 80, steamed by train into Pittsburgh, hit his typical stride by riding from his Pullman sleeper to the depot on a baggage cart. After being pushed some 300 yds. (the length of eleven passenger cars) by a Pennsylvania Railroad cop and a Pittsburgh Symphony flack, Sir Thomas met the usual pack of newshounds, barked with a keen pitch for the headlines. As for the "lollipops concerts" that he planned to conduct, it would be the "soothing, soporific" music that he customarily plays...
After steaming into Manhattan to begin a U.S. concert tour, Britain's mellowing (80) Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, accompanied by his 27-year-old bride of five months, showed further signs of gaining on the famed terrible temper that he once lost daily. He even waved a tiny U.S. flag, mustered an almost benign expression...
...Thomas Beecham recorded the work with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus (Jennifer Vyvyan, Monica Sinclair, Jon Vickers, Giorgio Tozzi; RCA Victor, 4 LPs, mono and stereo). His performance is the most opulent of the lot, the most animated-and by all odds the farthest from any thought in Handel's mind. In defiance of "drowsy armchair purists," Beecham offers a thunderously 19th century-styled orchestration-lush, richly colored, and full of dramatic contrasts. Soloists and chorus are uniformly fine, but the recording is not for listeners who take their Handel neat. Eugene Ormandy offers a severely cut reading...
...Malcolm Sargent produces a package (Elsie Morison, Marjorie Thomas, Richard Lewis, James Milligan; the Huddersfield Choral Society; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel, 3 LPs, mono and stereo) that lacks the fire of Beecham, the vocal glories of some of the Ormandy passages, emerges as painstaking rather than impassioned. Perhaps the best performance of the crop is furnished by Hermann Scherchen (Pierrette Alarie, Nan Merriman, Leopold Simoneau, Richard Standen; the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Academy Chorus; Westminster, 4 LPs, stereo), which is marked by some lovely, light-textured choral passages, a translucent orchestral sound and a movingly...