Word: conductor
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...Comme elle est beau!" exclaimed Actress Mia Farrow at Paris' Orly Airport, where she had flown to receive her new baby. "Comme elle est belle!" corrected her husband, Conductor Andre Previn. It had taken two years to make the arrangements, but the three-year-old Previn twins now have a three-month-old sister, a war orphan from Saigon. Her name, which Andre says "has just the right Eastern ring about it," is Kym Lark. It means Miss Joyful...
...idealized symphonic conductor has Leonard Bernstein's flair, Herbert von Karajan's grace and Zubin Mehta's youth. But when the directors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra cast around for a conductor to save their troubled orchestra in 1968, they threw out all the stereotypes and selected a man who looked, according to one Chicago musician, like a "tennis player or shortstop or golfer" on the podium. He was also bald and aging. Looks aside, Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony were made for each other Together they are producing some of the world...
...span of four seasons, Solti (pronounced Sholtee) has brought the Chicago back to the preeminence of its days under Fritz Reiner (1953-1963) The Solti sound, not the sound of trouble, is the talk of the music world. Indeed there has not been such excitement about a marriage of conductor and orchestra in the U.S. since the golden days of the 1930s when Toscanini led the New York Philharmonic, Stokowski the Philadelphia and Koussevitzky the Boston. In recent years, only George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra have approached the august virtuosity, combustible power and quartet-like intimacy that Solti...
Such commonsensical candidness has endeared Solti to musicians; that endearment goes a long way toward explaining his success. Without the loyalty and respect of his musicians, no conductor can long preside over an orchestra-much less produce great music. Musicians are notoriously independent, as the old saw about the French flutist demonstrates. Ordered by a conductor to play in a certain style, the musician said: "Very well, I'll play it his way at rehearsal, but just wait till the concert. After all, man ami, it's my flute." With Solti, it is different. Says Orchestre de Paris...
...musicians ever look at a conductor in exactly the same way. Where Friedman sees the metaphysical and Nilsson a mellower Solti, Flutist Debost sees the diabolical: "There is something of the wolf or the Hun about Solti. As he conducts, his eyes turn into cracks, his ears become pointed, and you can sort of imagine him riding a horse bareback across the steppes...