Word: conductor
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...conductor for life" of the fabled Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, 74, long ago grew accustomed to governing his orchestra with an autocratic hauteur that was seldom challenged. So the conductor expected no back-chair back talk when he named Sabine Meyer, 23, as the new solo clarinetist, and only the second female member in the philharmonic's 100-year history. But an overwhelming majority of the 118-member orchestra voted to oppose Von Karajan's protégée as "unsuitable" because of her alleged weakness as an ensemble performer. Outraged, the conductor coolly informed...
Another charge is that Levine plays favorites with singers, overusing some voices while ignoring others. "Levine's love affairs with certain voices are total," complains a Met singer. "When he finds a voice he likes, he uses it over and over." Like any other conductor, Levine has a roster of singers he finds congenial, among them Soprano Teresa Stratas, Tenor Placido Domingo and Baritone Milnes. Sometimes, as with veteran Diva Scotto, their voices are long faded but still histrionically effective. Sometimes they are not up to major-house standards, as with Tenor Philip Creech, whom Levine has pushed beyond...
...wall of Levine's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side is a framed quotation from Thomas Mann's novella The Tables of the Law, given to the conductor by his longtime live-in companion, Sue Thomson. It reads, in part: "Mighty and long labor lay ahead, labor which would have to be achieved through anger and patience before the uncouth hordes could be formed into a people who would be more than the usual community to whom the ordinary was comfortable ..." Too often, there is an air of comfortable ordinariness about the Met, such as casting...
Szell died in 1970, and Levine's apprenticeship came to an end. What he required now was a break, and luck was obliging. The San Francisco Opera needed a conductor for the last few Toscas of the season and hired Levine. By chance, a Met administrator heard him, and was impressed. Levine made his Met debut the next year, also with Tosca. His career began a rapid ascent, aided by Levine's manager, Ronald Wilford of Columbia Artists Management Inc. Wilford oversees the livelihoods of many major conductors, including Mstislav Rostropovich of the National Symphony and Seiji Ozawa...
Even in a profession marked by dedication, Levine's obsession with music is pronounced. "His life consists only of conducting," says one assistant conductor at the Met. "He is a conductor, and that is what he is." He is not interested in sports, and he is unconcerned with religion. Although born into a family of Reform Jews, he was never confirmed, and he accepted Bayreuth's invitation to lead Wagner's Christian allegory, Parsifal, in an opera house that, during the Hitler years, was a citadel of Nazism. "I wanted to go to Bayreuth," he explains, "because...