Word: conductor
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...mostly handwritten pages of music and manuscripts, and 1,500 hours of unique audio and video recordings of music by the great 20th century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. This cache of riches has been piling up at the apartment, home of Matsov's father, Roman, Shostakovich's favorite conductor. The works were performed and recorded against the will of Soviet bosses, who either banned Shostakovich or suspected him of "formalism" and other anti-Communist sins. The persecution is commonly thought to have succeeded in breaking him, but as the recordings prove, the composer resisted with the help of Russian pianist...
...little trouble getting dates. Heaven knows why: she weighs in the low 200s, has a face as remorseless as a gulag commandant's and works as a corpse dresser in a Munich mortuary. Then one day she lays eyes on Eisi (Eisi Gulp), a dishy young subway conductor. Lust at first sight has rarely been so transforming. Marianne's stolid features crack into a swooning smile. Armed with subway schedules and candy bars and tarted up in a dress that must have come from Friedrich's of Heidelberg, she prowls the underground for her erotic prey. Will she find...
...thunder, even if the piece was Tchaikovsky's thunderous Piano Concerto No. 1. Horowitz was unable to speak English, but it was clear from the rehearsals that even a translator would be no help. "Beecham thought I was of no importance," the pianist remembers. At the concert, the conductor adopted an even more ponderous tempo than during the preparation. As the concerto progressed, Horowitz felt the audience slipping inexorably away, and it was clear that desperate action was called...
...York City, 1932. In a golden age of conductors, one stood above all the others in popular estimation: the ferocious, dynamic, irascible Arturo Toscanini. It was inevitable that the paths of the world's most celebrated conductor and its fastest-rising pianist would cross. Intersecting them was Toscanini's youngest child Wanda...
Sonia was the tragic Horowitz. A pretty but moody girl with dark burning Toscanini eyes, she was her famed grandfather's favorite and could speak to him in a way that nobody else dared. The maestro once asked her whether she would prefer to be a conductor or a pianist. "A conductor," Sonia replied. "It's easier." She was naturally talented, adept at the piano, a good writer, accomplished at painting and photography. But she was emotionally unstable, and Toscanini's death in January 1957 grieved her deeply. Five months later, she was severely injured in a motor-scooter accident...