Word: conductor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...kitchen stove in a London flat wafts the comforting aroma of classic chicken soup, enough to feed a hungry orchestra. From a small upright piano in the living room wafts a bittersweet trickle of melody, enough to feed a hungry spirit. Michael Tilson Thomas, the 45-year-old principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, is cooking on both burners...
Very nice. But invoking Rilke to demonstrate Bruckner is an impulse perhaps best confided to close friends, and certainly not to 100 or so impatient orchestra players. Besides, any conductor who was foolish enough to flog his musicians with images of leaves -- let alone leaves whimpering in denial -- would be hooted off the podium at the first fluttering whimp. Thomas learned a lesson on this point in his callow days during a rehearsal of Also Sprach Zarathustra with the Chicago Symphony. All his schoolboy nattering on the intellectual subtext of Strauss evoked only sly mockery from the musicians. At length...
Finally, in August 1988, Berge, the dynamic president of Yves Saint Laurent, was appointed to run the project. Five months later, he set off the biggest flap of all when he unceremoniously fired Daniel Barenboim and shelved the conductor's programming plans. By May of last year, when Chung, plucked from | the obscurity of the Saarland Radio Orchestra in West Germany, was named Barenboim's surprise successor, the new administration had little more to offer than a notion that the house would open early this year, with something, sung by somebody or other. The stage seemed set for disaster...
Easier but wrong. Because, as strange as the notion may seem to those who view opera as Dr. Johnson's "exotic and irrational entertainment," art matters. It matters in Czechoslovakia, where a playwright has become President; in East Germany, where a Leipzig conductor, Kurt Masur, was a spiritual leader of the peaceful revolution; in Lithuania, where a musicologist is seeking to lead his land out of the Soviet Union. And it matters in Paris, where the Socialist Mitterrand has undertaken a series of cultural public-works projects that have enhanced the quality of life in the world's most beautiful...
Still, Landsbergis seems an unlikely conductor of Lithuania's symphony of defiance. With his brown beard, wire-rim glasses and brown corduroy jacket, he looks every bit the egghead that he is. A pianist at heart and a professor of music by trade, Landsbergis is more comfortable before a keyboard than a crowd; the music he sends up from the ivories is far more lyrical and moving than the political articles he pens. He is married to a fellow pianist, Grazina, and is proud that his family is caught up in the struggle for independence. "All of them are emotionally...