Word: conductor
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STRAUSS: Also Sprach Zarathustra; Macbeth (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon). Who could have predicted that a tone poem based on Friedrich Nietzsche's notions of the death of God, the will to power and the rise of a superman would become one of symphonic literature's greatest hits? Yet long before Director Stanley Kubrick popularized its spectacular organ and brass apostrophe in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Strauss's blazing essay in orchestrational virtuosity ranked high in audiences' esteem. Maazel and the Viennese give this mettle tester a commanding reading, capturing the grandeur...
PROKOFIEV: No. 5 (St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin, conductor; RCA). Prokofiev's most popular symphony requires an accomplished orchestra with strings and woodwinds able to negotiate the Russian's tricky, sassy writing, as well as a brass section prepared to blast away with dignity when the time comes, as it often does. It also needs a conductor with an ear attuned to its harmonic piquancies and piston-engine rhythms. Slatkin and his crack orchestra, who are evolving the most exciting orchestral partnership since George Szell transformed the Cleveland Orchestra about 30 years ago, have what it takes...
DVORAK: Serenade for Strings, Op. 22; Czech Suite, Op. 39 (Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Armin Jordan, conductor; Erato). Dvořák is best known for his last three symphonies (including the inescapable "New World") and his omnipresent Cello Concerto, but many have long admired his smaller works. The Czech Suite brims with rustic high spirits−it includes a polka, a sousedka, or "neighbors' dance," and a dashing furiant−while the Serenade for Strings is a five-movement study in country-squire elegance. Jordan, a Swiss conductor who came to general attention leading the score...
...corpses in the streets of Paris; the French economy was wrecked by a wave of delirious speculation whipped up by a Scottish financier, John Law. But on canvas, the Cytherean games never end. Men need paradises, however fictive, in times of trouble, and art is a poor conductor of historical events. One thinks of the impressionists constructing their scenes of pleasure through the days of the commune of 1871 and the Franco-Prussian...
...merely painfully impressive. Tenor Placido Domingo is one of the finest of operatic actors, but even his persuasive characterization of Calaf, the unknown prince who overcomes the ice princess's sexual misanthropy, could not disguise the fact that the part lies uncomfortably high for him. In the pit, Conductor Cohn Davis, leading the opera for the first time, delivered a limp, unidiomatic account of the score that reduced its most thrilling moments to polenta...