Word: conduction
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...face remained expressionless and unseeing as a blind man's. Otto Klemperer, 72, painfully mounted the podium, planted his feet firmly apart, and gave the downbeat for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It was the climactic moment of a current London Beethoven cycle, and once he began to conduct, he was hardly recognizable as the same man who had painfully shuffled toward the center of the stage...
...doesn't conduct like a conductor," a British composer said of him, "but like a man, and a great one at that." Never stooping to showy mannerisms or podium pyrotechnics, Klemperer kept his semi-paralyzed right hand clenched in a permanent fist and conducted almost entirely with his left, pulling the orchestra as if the musicians were marionettes on a hundred invisible strings. With his left hand shaking, soothing, plucking, dancing, he shaped phrases, tossed cues, whipped his men to new intensities. What he did above all was to keep an inexorable grip on the tempo and rhythm...
Remote & Austere. He quit Budapest in 1950. Emaciated, half-paralyzed, speaking with a slur, Klemperer kept hunting for occasional conducting jobs. In 1951, in Canada, he fell again and broke his left thigh bone. Hobbling about on crutches, he still had the will to conduct but not the strength to stand up while doing it. Sitting on the podium before orchestras, he showed his old relentless temperament. One day, while conducting Don Giovanni in Cologne, he was so moved at the crash of trombone chords announcing the arrival of the statue for dinner with the Don that Klemperer spontaneously stood...
...church has many adherents due to the main centuries of missionary activity in the area but one doubts whether it has any value to influence conduct besides being an emotional purge e.g. it is estimated that 70% of all births on the island are illegitimate...
Light-Fingered. In Seoul, Korea, three officials of the Railroad Bureau were sacked for "unbecoming conduct" after their arrest on charges of stealing ten tons of rails...