Word: conductor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Music and prisons both have necessary functions, but they sure don't go together," Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa said a week ago before a packed auditorium in Tanglewood, Mass. Tanglewood, in the Berkshires, is the summer home of the Boston Symphony and the state is planning to establish a medium security prison there. The proposal to convert a vacant Jesuit seminary near Tanglewood into a facility for 260 prisoners has met vociferous opposition from townspeople, area business and Symphony players who view the intense security and the omnipresent barbed wire that would accompany the prison establishment as threatening...
Does the world really need another conductor of Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and the other immortals? If his name is Klaus Tennstedt, the answer is a fortissimo yes. Unknown to the majority of American music lovers, the former East German maestro has become one of the most sought-after guest conductors in the U.S. Watching, the onlooker may wonder why: on the podium the man often resembles a stoned stork. Hearing his music is another matter: Tennstedt elicits a sound with the startling ring of rightness. Indeed, his musical logic may be the most profound since the late Otto Klemperer...
...Opera, then picked up guest engagements in Europe and America. Tennstedt made his U.S. debut in December 1974, conducting the Boston Symphony in Brahms and Bruckner. The complex, granitic Eighth Symphony of Bruckner was hardly an easy choice for a newcomer, but the performance made it clear that a conductor of the first rank had arrived. The Boston had not sounded so brilliant in years. Subsequent appearances - topped by a prodigious Beethoven Ninth Symphony last summer at Tanglewood -confirmed his reputation...
...bend during tender moments. In his lexicon of body English, an avian flap of the elbow is as meaningful as a sword thrust of the baton. The fluid gestures may be idiosyncratic, but they rarely fail to communicate. Says Tennstedt: "The musician must have the feeling that what the conductor wants is absolutely right. The musician must want it too. It's a matter of gaming his confidence." Tennstedt is going to be engendering a lot of confidence in the seasons ahead. William Bender
...although he has been given some splendid singing actresses to work with - Régine Crespin, Shirley Verrett, Betsy Norden, Maria Ewing. As Blanche, the rich-voiced Ewing emerges as a genuine comer in her blend of inner anguish and, at the end, heroic resolve. In the pit, French Conductor Michel Plasson shapes the music with enough loving deftness to underscore the fact that Dialogues is one of the few masterpieces of 20th century opera...