Word: conductor
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...Leonard Bernstein made a spectacular debut with the New York Philharmonic, substituting at the last minute for ailing Conductor Bruno Walter. Bernstein found himself on the front pages the next day, and ever since he has been one of the most prominent figures on the American musical scene. Familiar to millions from his lectures and performances on television, renowned as the composer of West Side Story, hailed as a formidable interpreter of Beethoven and Mahler, Bernstein may be the most protean talent and the most celebrated conductor America has yet produced...
...most controversial as well. Joan Peyser's Bernstein: A Biography (Morrow; $22.95), published this week, has been causing ripples of rumor and anticipation in the music world for months. A wide-ranging examination of the composer-conductor's life, works and milieu, it tackles such touchy subjects as Bernstein's Jewishness, his support for left-wing causes and, in what is surely the book's most provocative allegation, his bisexuality...
Peyser, former editor of the Musical Quarterly and author of an earlier warts-and-all biography of Composer-Conductor Pierre Boulez, professes to admire the manifest gifts of Bernstein the musician, but clearly she finds Bernstein the man repugnant. How else to account for incident after unpalatable incident that depicts him in the most unflattering light? Here he is, sharing a panel in Minneapolis and expounding publicly on a well-known colleague's adult circumcision. Here he is at a party at Indiana University in 1982, obscenely serenading the dean of the music school...
...when an electric current -- which is simply a stream of moving electrons -- flows in a conductor, electrons move from empty slot to empty slot in the outer shells of the atoms. A material like rubber, on the other hand, is an insulator: it consists largely of atoms with completely filled, stable outer shells. Thus when voltage is applied, electrons have no empty slots to move into, and no current flows...
Cellist Yo Yo Ma, at the ripe old age of thirty-some-odd years, is already considered one of the greats of the century. Leonard Bernstein, an acclaimed Mahler conductor, recently inaugurated a cycle of that composer's symphonies. Conductor Andre Previn's Rachmaninoff, it is widely said, is the most sumptuous and melancholy. And the list goes...