Word: conductor
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Dictators might have envied the cult of personality that centered on Arturo Toscanini in America. For a half-century he reigned supreme in the popular estimation as the world's greatest conductor, and when he died in 1957 at the age of 89, the New York Times spoke for the nation: "Both as an operatic and symphonic conductor, he achieved a stature no other conductor before him had attained...
...Wagner made up 40% of his New York Philharmonic programs; Puccini and Verdi were favorites in the opera house -- and his interest in contemporary music, aside from fellow Italians like Respighi, was almost nil. The famous RCA recordings of the Beethoven symphonies now sound febrile and coarse. Even the conductor's notorious temper and torrents of epithets, which once seemed so romantically apposite -- no musician had really lived until Toscanini called him Porco! (pig) -- come off today as operatic posturing...
...most flattering gift of all: an orchestra created specially for him. As director of the NBC Symphony, he reached a national radio and television audience and became a visitor to millions of homes that had never heard classical music in such abundance. He was no longer merely a conductor; he had become an icon...
...mixture of brutal dissonance and sunny consonance, make Turangalila-Symphonie one of the French composer's finest creations. It is difficult for both performer and listener, which may be why it is rarely played in concert. It does, however, offer a splendid workout for a CD player. Finnish Conductor Salonen, 28, leads an assured performance that serves notice of his arrival as an important young maestro. Two atmospheric works by Poland's Witold Lutoslawski also reflect his ear for sonorities...
...tomb of the unconscious," but what occurred onstage was a fairly standard day in the death of the House of Atreus. The real pleasures of the production were the whiplash performance of Soprano Hildegard Behrens in the title role and the gloriously haunted Klytemnestra of Mezzo Christa Ludwig. Conductor Seiji Ozawa, leading his first Elektra, sought out the brutal score's elusive lyric elements and found most of them...