Word: conductor
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...replace a swinging conductor who wears a Beatle hairdo and wows the crowds with his lithe podium acrobatics? If the man is Seiji Ozawa, the answer is, not easily. For the past three years he has led both the Boston and San Francisco symphony orchestras, but will give up the latter next season. Last week San Francisco named his successor. He is Holland's Edo de Waart, 34, the orchestra's current principal guest conductor and, since 1967, conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic. Like Ozawa, De Waart has charm, good looks and lots of hair. He also...
...Symphony No. 2 in D, townspeople jumped to their feet in a shouting five-minute ovation. As the applause started to slacken, a rancher in a sheepskin coat shouted from the balcony: "Keep on clappin' and they'll keep on play-in'!" So they did. When Conductor Maurice Abravanel, 73, and the 85 members of the Utah Symphony Orchestra responded with an encore from Handel's Water Music, the crowd in the renovated movie theater burst into cheers...
Abravanel, a Jew who traces his ancestry to 15th century Spain, grew up in Lausanne, Switzerland, where his father was a pharmacist. The family lived in the house of famed Swiss Conductor Ernest Ansermet. "Stravinsky and MiIhaud used to visit often," Abravanel recalls. "I played piano four-hands with Stravinsky as a lark." He went to Berlin to study with a brilliant young composer named Kurt Weill. In 1933 both men fled Nazi Germany for Paris. There, Abravanel became a ballet conductor, performing the premiere of the Balanchine-Brecht-Weill ballet-with-song, The Seven Deadly Sins...
Sing-Alongs. Wherever the orchestra travels, it is divided into two busloads, one called the Saints (for nonsmoking Mormons) and the other the Sinners (for tobacco-loving musicians). The conductor, affectionately nicknamed "Big Mo" by his players, usually travels by car, avoiding any show of favoritism; although a non-Mormon, he is also a nonsmoker. If constant traveling does breed a unique togetherness, it also reveals the peculiar schism between the Mormons and other members of the orchestra. Aboard the Saints' bus, the majority of passengers are women, mostly string players who have been with the orchestra for years...
Died. Jean Martinon, 66, French composer-conductor who led orchestras around the world, including the Lamoureux Orchestra of Paris, the Israeli Philharmonic and, from 1963 to 1968, the Chicago Symphony, which finally replaced him with Georg Solti after disputes between Martinon's critics and supporters had plunged the orchestra into a state of near anarchy; after a long illness; in Paris. Martinon, who had trained as a violinist at the National Music Conservatory in the late 1920s, began conducting on short notice. In 1945, while on tour as a violinist, he was asked to take over-largely because...