Word: conductor
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What I did get was some of the finer music to be heard in Boston in awhile. Conductor Craig Smith prefers a richer, warmer Handel than my original-instrument tuned ears are accustomed to, but the quality was impeccable. Had Sellars and Smith done a little judicious paring on the score, my ears would have left totally elated instead of mildly exhausted...
...real question, though, was, How would it sound? Opened in 1891, the Manhattan concert hall has long been renowned for its rich sound. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler once remarked that the hall with the best acoustics was the one with the best performances, but at Carnegie, second-rate symphonies sometimes sounded first rate. There, the resonance bathed performers in a mellow amber glow, and at orchestral climaxes the floor vibrated sympathetically beneath the listeners' feet. What did it matter if the subway occasionally added its profundo rumble to the bass, or if passing fire sirens sounded a wailing obbligato...
Others disagree. "It is an extraordinary-sounding hall," says Conductor Dennis Russell Davies. "I have the feeling it is more brilliant than it was in the past, but I mean it positively, a spectacularly brilliant orchestral sound." Soprano Benita Valente, who sang there before and after the renovations, calls it a "little brighter, but glorious." Violinist Isaac Stern, president of Carnegie Hall and one of the leaders in the fight to save it from demolition in 1960, says, "What you hear now is this golden wash of sound, and at the same time there is clarity...
...them and to some extent disguised technical deficiencies, particularly in intonation. In the new Carnegie, performers will have to experiment with seating arrangements and stage positions to obtain the most favorable acoustics. "Carnegie always had the reputation for musicians that you could just go out there and play," says Conductor Davies. "Now they must work more to do their best." This may mean that at first there will be fewer memorable evenings of the kind that have made the hall pre-eminent. But in the long run Carnegie Hall will offer a truer forum for projecting the world's musical...
Some graduates continue in the field of their undergraduate work. Perhaps some of the passages in "West Side Story" were developed while Leonard Bernstein '39 was writing his thesis on "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music". The conductor, pianist, composer and teacher penciled on the back of one of the pages, "I wonder what critics in 1975 will have to say on a young American composer...