Word: conductor
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After such a long and bitter dispute, the climax was no surprise. American Conductor Lorin Maazel abruptly abrogated his contract as director of the Vienna State Opera and resigned effective Sept. 1. Said Austrian Minister of Education and Art Helmut Zilk, who oversees the opera company and had clashed repeatedly with Maazel during the conductor's 1½-year tenure: "I don't want to say anything bad about him, but he has no manners and is a megalomaniac." Observed Maazel: "Every three weeks we have another unprofessional statement from a minister who only goes to football games...
...rapido: Italian Claudio Abbado, 50, who finished as music director at Milan's La Scala opera house last month. (Maazel's purely administrative duties have fallen to new General Director Claus Helmut Drese.) To fill Abbado's prized post, La Scala tapped another Italian, Philadelphia Orchestra Conductor Riccardo Muti, 42. In 1982 Muti rejected a similar offer from London's Royal Opera House to follow Sir Colin Davis there in 1986. Apparently La Scala's was an offer he could not refuse, although he will continue to lead the Philadelphia...
...done at the same time," says the Berlin-born, California-bred Previn, who previously led the London Symphony for eleven years. He was promptly snapped up by Ernest Fleischmann, the executive director in Los Angeles, who when manager of the London Symphony first brought Previn there as a guest conductor. Deadpans Fleischmann of his happy timing: "It was great luck...
...dancing. Virtually every word of dialogue MacLaine speaks is about herself, and that is just as she intends it: "Philosophically, celebrating myself is what I am into." Apart from her one-liners, there is one highly effective if overlong joke: she sings a Harold Arlen medley while the conductor and orchestra, supposedly influenced by the ghosts of George and Ira Gershwin, for whom the theater is named, keep bursting in with Gershwin themes. MacLaine manages to find a wistful, slightly torchy quality in one unlikely number, If I Only Had a Brain from The Wizard of Oz. For the rest...
DIED. Gordon Jenkins, 73, pop-music arranger and conductor whose shimmering, swirling string backgrounds enhanced the performances, on records and TV, of such stars as Judy Garland, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra; of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease); in Malibu, Calif. Pianist Jenkins started composing and arranging with the Swing Era's big bands, wrote Benny Goodman's closing theme, Goodbye, and won a Grammy Award for his stylish 1965 arrangement of Sinatra's It Was a Very Good Year...