Word: conductor
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...book is named after an Italian-born conductor, and it brings a staggering amount of research to bear on the career of Arturo Toscanini, the classical music cult figure who, after his adoption by America, became a symbol of the supposed parity between American and European culture...
...Seiji Ozawa of the Boston Symphony is at the top of his profession. Yet the Japanese conductor remains a man of two worlds...
...terrace overlooking Lake Fuschl near Salzburg, Seiji Ozawa and Yo-Yo Ma are deep in conversation. "Remember that discussion about whether an Oriental can do Western music?" asks the Japanese conductor in heavily accented English. Ma does. "Music can be learned, really, by anybody who cares to know it well enough and deeply enough," says the cellist, who is of Chinese parentage but as American as a baseball...
Torn between his two lives, Ozawa has sent his wife Vera and their two children back to live in Japan, and he returns to their Tokyo home often. Yet a full-time career in Japan would be too limiting for a conductor mentioned as a potential successor to Karajan in Berlin. Although there have long been predictions of his imminent departure from Boston, Ozawa speaks confidently of his future with the orchestra (his only permanent post). He is, he says, content...
...century. And in a separate chapter, he also provides a musical assessment by examining Toscanini's recordings in formidable detail. But the author's most important contribution is his analysis of Toscanini's pervasive influence on what music was programmed and the way it was performed: the conductor's determination to play certified great works defined, and confined, the repertoire for the next generation of musicians. Igor Stravinsky, whose music Toscanini largely ignored, lamented, "What a pity it is that his inexhaustible energy and his marvellous talents should almost always be wasted on such eternally repeated works...