Word: brico
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...Antonia Brico made her conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic. She was 28 years old, and the first woman ever to secure that honor--the stuff of which dreams are made. The 40 years that followed have been, for Brico, mostly a story of dreams deferred. Aside from a handful of guest-conducting engagements at the Metropolitan Opera, Lewisohn Stadium and the New York Philharmonic, she has been unable to crack one of the few remaining exclusively male fields...
...ensuing decades have brought lean years for Brico, who has labored in obscurity. She has fed her artistic soul on the scant fare of four or five concerts a year with the Denver Businessmen's Orchestra--and has fed her body by teaching piano. But if one waits long enough, the worm will sometimes turn. Twenty-odd years ago, one Judy Collins, age 10, landed in Brico's lap for piano lessons. Today, Collins is in a position to return part of the gift of this most gifted woman. She and Jill Godmilow have produced a documentary on Brico...
Collins, Godmilow and a technical crew spent several days filming Brico in her Denver home. The rest of the footage shows Brico's Denver Symphony in rehearsal and performance, as well as her 1930 Berlin debut. Brico is on-camera almost the entire time; in response to Collins's questions, she talks with direct simplicity about her music, her friendship with Albert Schweitzer, her colleagues, and (one senses for the first time) the heartbreak that is a conductor's lot when deprived of an orchestra...
...inevitable that a film like Antonia will be asked to carry more weight than just its immediate subject. Brico is only one in a generation of women who have paid with their lives for a key their daughters may yet live to use. Since most of us lack the means to repay that generational debt, films like Antonia must do it for us. But Collins and Godmilow avoid the temptation to use the film as a political vehicle. It is, from beginning to end, a study of the life and work of one woman, on whom the eye is trained...
After visiting her old friend and teacher Jean Sibelius in Finland, bright-eyed Antonio Brico, 48, Denver conductor, flew on to French Equatorial Africa to see another old musical friend, Organist-Physician Albert Schweitzer, who had cabled: "You've always wanted to see my hospital. Get yourself a yellow-fever shot and a sun helmet and come...