Word: beecham
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...Thomas Beecham suggested to modern composers that they become "more socially stupid" and "intellectually puerile." Lecturing in Manhattan, he feared that the "creative current ... in music is running dry. . . . Let's please pray that our creative artists . . . be outrageous, impractical, impossible . . . but . . . recover their pride in their craft...
Carmen Jones (music by Georges Bizet; book & lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; produced by Billy Rose) turns the opera that Sir Thomas Beecham once called "the sturdiest oak in the operatic forest" into the most brilliant show on Broadway. If Bizet's Carmen and the all-Negro Carmen Jones live, artistically, on different sides of the railroad tracks, they nevertheless represent the shortest distance between one exciting kind of job and another. Drastic changes have been made. Carmen has been retired in a kiln, not warmed over in an oven. There is no capricious tinkering for tinkering...
...Only new singer to raise a ripple of anticipation was the 18-year-old coloratura Patrice Munsel (TIME, Nov. 22), scheduled for a debut in Mignon. The Met's brightest stars this year, as last, were its conductors. The first week included an exquisitely polished Tristan (Sir Thomas Beecham), a brilliant Rosenkavalier (George Szell...
Mendelssohn: "Italian" Symphony (New York Philharmonic-Symphony, Sir Thomas Beecham conducting; Columbia; 8 sides). A superb, warm performance, ranking with Koussevitzky's shimmering Victor version...
This was no invalid's gesture-it was one of the finest performances of Tristan und Isolde in recent years. The conductor was Sir Thomas Beecham, and the cast a group of top-flight singers, some from Manhattan's Metropolitan. Isolde spent her first act reclining on a shipboard divan, with the necessary business carried out by her maid Brangäne. The second-act love scene had perhaps the fittest staging in history: Tristan and Isolde sang on a couch. In the last act, Isolde was carried on stage by Tristan's old retainer Kurwenal...