Word: conductor
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...mention composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein '39 and cellist Yo-Yo Ma '75, writers John H. Updike '54 and Peter B. Benchley '61, poets T.S. Eliot '10 and George Santayana '99, and a multitude of others...
...singing, his voice was too light then to be fully convincing. Today, at 43, his tenor is darker and more baritonal, and he thus is open to experimentation with new roles and even with new careers. Later this month, for example, Domingo makes his Met debut as a conductor, leading Puccini's La Bohème, and he is currently appearing as Don José in Francesco Rosi's film of Bizet's Carmen (see CINEMA...
That radiance is fully celebrated by Levine. At 41 already a brilliant conductor of Parsifal, he views Lohengrin as a kind of musical prequel to Wagner's last work. He adopted a daringly slow _ tempo for the Act I prelude, letting it burn with a fervid religiosity, but gave the chorus and onstage "brass players thrilling free rein in the opera's frequent boisterous moments. Levine has mastered the sense of timelessness so crucial to successful Wagner performances in general, and static works like Lohengrin in particular; one looks forward to the day, two seasons hence, when...
Alas, even the maestro could not keep harmony among his dissonant musicians. Zubin Mehta, 48, the Bombay-born conductor of the New York Philharmonic, had returned to his native land after an absence of 17 years. In New Delhi, the eleventh stop of the orchestra's eight-nation Asian tour, all seemed fine as two elephants tromboned a welcome, but then his musicians began raising a cacophony of complaints about the hotel accommodations. "Unbearable," screeched a violinist. "There are bugs in the bed," one musician whined. "And cockroaches," chimed in another. Mehta quieted the sour-note chorus by allowing...
BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 (Pianist Emanuel Ax, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, conductor; RCA). The culmination of Brahms' early style, the D minor concerto began life as a sonata for two pianos; ever the perfectionist, Brahms transformed it into a symphony before finally discovering that what the music really wanted to be was a piano concerto. This rawboned yet ardently romantic piece gets a grand reading from Ax and Levine. But they never get so concerned with profundity that they forget that it is, after all, the work of a 25-year-old still finding his way. Particularly...