Word: conductor
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...Diaz as Antony and Tenor Thomas as Caesar. Composer Barber's setting for Shakespeare's text was notable chiefly for an orchestration built of conflict ing clouds of moody, often eerie thun-derbursts of sound, punctuated with enough jutting exclamations of dissonance to label it contemporary, and Conductor Thomas Schippers gave it all the fierce sweep of a Force Three hurricane. Yet it was only in the latter part of the second act and in the third that the music itself overwhelmed the stage dazzles. There alone did Barber's vocal writing transform itself into genuine opera...
...miss many. His predecessor, an easygoing ex-tenor named Edward Johnson, had run a tidy if not altogether harmonious house where the terrible-tempered diva and the haughty, naughty tenor reigned supreme. Bing started with a bang by firing 39 singers and several musicians, including his cousin, Conductor Paul Breisach, as well as aging Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, whose variations on the score had been the bane of Met conductors for years. Amid the howls of "Adolf Bing!" and "Prussian dictator" Bing remained serene. "I will run this house," he said, "on the principle of quality and quality alone...
...most nerveless member of the company, of course, is Bing himself. He often pulls a Hitchcock and turns up onstage as a breastplated soldier in Eugen Onegin or leading the soldier's band in Faust. But he is really a frustrated conductor. In the theater, in the subway, walking along the street, his hands are continually dancing as he sings and hums some aria playing through his mind (he also knows the words and music to more than 1,000 lieder, continually amazes the singers by quoting snatches of librettos from obscure operas). At night, sitting in his office...
Only trouble is, he hardly ever gets the beat right. Not long ago, Bing sat in the Met auditorium watching a rehearsal and conducting his own version of the rhythm, his hand discreetly fluttaring around below seat-top level. Behind him sat Conductor Thomas...
...foreigners are showing a lively interest. Willys-Overland, 38%-owned by Kaiser Industries, two months ago began assembling Jeeps near the Nordeste city of Recife, where Kelvinator is already building refrigerators. Firestone plans an $11 million tire plant and Italy's Pirelli is building a wire and conductor factory. Other European groups are setting up ventures in canning, batteries and cement forms. Last week the U.S.-backed Inter-American Development Bank chipped in $29.5 million to help finance a $79 million expansion of the Paulo Afonso hydroelectric plant on the San Francisco River in the Nordeste...