Word: conductor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With a hundred cellos gleaming on it, the stage of New York's Philharmonic Hall looked like the setting for a Busby Berkeley musical. The earlier part of the program included Soprano Beverly Sills, Pianist Rudolf Serkin and Conductor Leopold Stokowski. But "Salud Casals" night did not really get under way until the guest of honor arrived with his all-cello orchestra. The performers had gathered from all over the world. Each cellist financed his own trip and donated his services for the privilege of being led by Pablo Casals in one of his brief compositions, a Catalan Sardana...
Casals played for two American Presidents (Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, John F. Kennedy in 1961) and for British monarchs starting with Queen Victoria in 1899. He knew Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov and Conductor Hans Richter, who had been a friend of Wagner. His book is stuffed with tales of great music makers at their most unbuckled moments. He tells how his friend Violinist Pablo Sarasate used to complain of insomnia because, he claimed, his room was full of turtles. Tiring of this fiction, Sarasate's friends filled the great virtuoso's quarters with real turtles. Sarasate contemplated the creatures...
...Festival did not turn out as well as it should have, with all this obvious talent, because the Symphony management and Mr. Steinberg did not allow enough time for production. The Orchestra has been tossed around among many conductors this season, partly because Steinberg has been ill, partly because he is not a full time resident. The variety of conducting styles to which it has been subjected is almost unbelievable, but the orchestra has held up well. Expecting an orchestra to put out a top flight performance of five different programs on five consecutive nights with a strange conductor...
...pace, the way Leinsdorf did. He made the orchestra forget the influence of his predecessor, and got it to produce a clarity of tone, especially in the strings, which Bernstein might well have envied. The concert definitely belonged to Rudolf and the listener went away feeling that the aging conductor had made the BSO perform beyond its normal capabilities...
Assured Masculinity. Physically, Gunn is a lean six-footer who bends slightly forward from the waist as if he were bracing himself against a brisk wind. His long tapered fingers shape the air with the aristocratic command of a symphony conductor, and his voice has a resonant precision that quells any incipient coughers in the audience. Psychically, his stage personality is one of intensely contained, almost glacial calm. He understates like distant rolling thunder. Even now, many blacks are playing the professional Negro on stage, parody Uncle Toms or militant minstrels, and thus catering to the applause and approval...