Word: conductor
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James Levine is the most powerful opera conductor in America...
...conductor, to weld a hundred men into one singing giant, to build up the most gorgeous arabesques of sound, to wave a hand and make the clamoring strings sink to a mutter, to wave again, and hear the brass crashing out in triumph, to throw up a finger, then another and another, and to know that with every one the orchestra would bound forward into a still more ecstatic surge and sweep, to fling oneself forward, and for a moment or so keep everything still, frozen, in the hollow of one's hand, and then to set them...
...burly figure standing calmly on the podium of a darkened opera house pit bears little resemblance to the conventionally glamorous image of a famous conductor. At 205 Ibs. and standing less than 5 ft. 10 in., he is built more like a stagehand than an aristocratic maestro, and his round face, capped by a corona of curly hair, is a world away from the suave image of a Leonard Bernstein. Yet as his baton comes slashing down with swift, chopping strokes, he is abruptly transformed into a figure of grace. Cuing the orchestra, effortlessly guiding singers through an opera...
Andrews jumped under the train and dragged Schnair, bleeding from a gash in his head, to a narrow cubbyhole beneath the platform out of the way of the wheels. The train began moving, but then screeched to a halt when a screaming bystander implored the conductor to stop the train. Andrews and Schnair huddled in the crawl space until the power was cut off and they could be hoisted to safety...
...former prodigy became even more prodigious. At 69, he played a marathon cycle in New York City that consisted of 17 compositions for piano and orchestra, on five programs, within two weeks; in 1961 he gave ten Carnegie Hall concerts in one season. Conductor Edouard van Remoortel was probably not exaggerating when he said that Rubinstein was "the only pianist you could wake up at midnight and ask to play any of 38 major piano concertos." Before blindness put an end to his public career in 1976, he was playing up to 100 concerts a year...