Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...since John F. Kennedy arrived to denounce the Berlin Wall in 1963 have West Germans lavished such adulation on a foreign visitor as they did last week on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. But the messages left by the two travelers, their visits separated by 26 years of history, were nearly as disparate as the directions from which they arrived. Whereas Kennedy's aim was to spread a message of resolve at the very height of the cold war, the Soviet leader proclaimed a new era in which East and West could peacefully share their common continent...
...news conference shortly before he left, Gorbachev responded somewhat evasively to a question about the Berlin Wall, calling it "no great problem." He repeated the standard East German position that the Wall could be torn down when the conditions that created it have disappeared. But even if Gorbachev were open to discussion on that matter, he would face certain resistance from East Germany, which opposes most of his liberal reforms. One measure of Gorbachev's standing in East Berlin: press coverage of his trip was consistently minimal...
...hefty recording contract, a telegenic personality and the ability to pull in a crowd both at home and on the road. In the U.S. a conductor must also subject himself (there are no women on the short list) to endless rounds of glad-handing and fund raising, while in Berlin he must have the political skills of a Franz von Papen to deal with a fractious orchestra and a powerful city bureaucracy...
...matter who gets the job in Berlin, Karajan's successor will almost certainly not be offered the life appointment that Karajan enjoyed, although the new man will be expected to maintain the Philharmonic's highly lucrative recording income -- another factor that favors Levine. The New York Philharmonic, for its part, has suffered under Mehta's indifferent performances and low appeal to record buyers. It needs a conductor with fire in the belly like Bernstein; if Billy Martin can be hired by the Yankees five times, can't Lenny come back once? Los Angeles, where the orchestra plays second fiddle...
Karajan and Previn step down, and another spin of the musical merry-go-round begins as the usual suspects are rounded up to fill their posts in Berlin and Los Angeles...