Word: bernstein
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dimitri Mitropoulos did before he was shooed away from New York in 1958) may find themselves watching helplessly as their musicians betray them in a thousand ways. The New York Philharmonic has made a refined art of ignoring any inept visitors among the conductors who substitute for Leonard Bernstein each year: the players keep all eyes studiously away from the podium in hopes of informing the audience that it is hearing their performance, not the maestro...
...years, and it has 15,000 regular subscribers most of whom never attend a concert but pay $5 or more each year for program notes to accompany the broadcasts. Its tours have taken it abroad more often than any other orchestra, and its appearances on television (with Leonard Bernstein the lucid, chatty narrator) have won it a wide audience of young people...
...successes, its career has been scarred by long periods of turbulence. Seven seasons under the pleasant direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos dimmed its luster, with audience, musicians and critics all bickering over the orchestra's wayward course. When Bernstein took over in 1958, the Philharmonic began to recapture the audience that it had not had since its "Golden Era" under Toscanini in the '30s. As the only American-born conductor of a major U.S. orchestra, Bernstein brought the Philharmonic new esprit and quieted its cranky audience. But soon his St. Vitus conducting technique upset even his fans; to many...
...Bernstein has shown a great flexibility and responsiveness to new programming ideas, and under him the New York Philharmonic has achieved a mastery of modern music, though Bernstein's approach to the classics is sometimes willful and distorted. The brass section is peerless, and the whole orchestra plays with exhilaration and drive. "My objection to some of the big orchestras in this country,'' Bernstein says, "is that they always sound like the X or the Y orchestra. The point in giving concerts is not to present an orchestra's sound but a composer's sound...
Ormandy has led the Philadelphia for 27 years, a longer tenure than that of any other major conductor. He shares with Bernstein an unbounded confidence in his players (though none call him "Gene," as New York musicians call Bernstein "Lenny"); in rehearsals, he treats them with a firm but gentle hand. On the podium, he uses no baton and, with his right hand liberated, gives his deepest concentration to color and balance. Perhaps as a result, his tempos sometimes drift...