Word: conductor
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...town; all 16 scheduled performances were sold out even before the opening. The piece's unique claim to be the American national opera is partly responsible, of course, as is the curiosity value associated with any first. But the Met delivers the goods: in the hands of a major conductor like James Levine, Porgy and Bess emerges as something ; richer than the overblown musical comedy it once appeared to be. Although many singers have used Porgy as a springboard to fame (Leontyne Price, for example, in 1952), the Met production reveals it as essentially a choral opera...
Coincidentally, two pieces inspired by Joyce's last novel, Finnegans Wake, were premiered a week apart and had practically the same name. Toru Takemitsu's rippling Riverrun (1984) was given its first performance by Pianist Peter Serkin and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Conductor Simon Rattle. Stephen Albert's ambitious RiverRun debuted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, under Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich with the National Symphony. In Manhattan, Violinist Gidon Kremer played the U.S. premiere of Soviet Composer Sofia Gubaidulina's knotty Offertorium with the New York Philharmonic, while across the East River, the Brooklyn Philharmonic presented the first indoor...
...DECEMBER 22. 1984, an electronics expect named Bernhard Goetz became a hero by pulling out a gun and shooting four teenagers who, he told the conductor of the IRI subway train on which he was riding, tried to rip him off. Then he went to New Hampshire...
...conductor, Mike Eames, is proceeding through car 9132, tranquilly collecting tickets. "It takes 20 minutes to get through two cars. Sometimes by Jamaica I get through. Sometimes I never get through." He is accompanied in his polite progression through the thrashing mass by hostile remarks about the unions, which the riders blame for much of their discomfort. The conductor passes below full-color images of joy and transformation: a naked woman wrapped in a quilt leaning against the knee of a man stroking her hair, a brilliantly lighted couple kissing forever...
...prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C. From her 1957 debut in San Francisco, as Madame Lidoine in Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, Price was recognized as a major talent. The following year, Conductor Herbert von Karajan cast her as Aida in Vienna; when she sang the Ethiopian princess at La Scala in 1960, one Italian critic exclaimed: "Our great Verdi would have found her the ideal Aida." Her Met debut came in 1961, as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore; that performance provoked...