Word: conductor
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...Vienna, Conductor Julius Rudel spent endless hours building miniature theaters and staging puppet operas-Salome in a shoe box, Parsifal in a packing crate. The training proved to be apt preparation for his job as director of the New York City Opera. For the past eight years, operating on a budget that would pass for carfare at the Metropolitan Opera, he has been nurturing his company in a glorified Manhattan shoe box called City Center. Last week, like slum kids transported to the country, Rudel and his 200-member troupe moved into the spacious luxury of the New York State...
...taxes on its Mecca Temple, Fiorello La Guardia foreclosed. The place was an unsalable white elephant, a dome-topped edifice built in 1925 and styled in Turkish-bath rococo. La Guardia finally decided to subsidize an opera company to present quality productions at moderate prices. Hungarian-born Conductor Laszlo Halasz was recruited as director, and in 1944 the New York City Opera made its debut with Tosca. It was a shaky start. In Tosca's last act, the guns of the firing squad failed to go off and the hapless hero was obliged to keel over in dead silence...
...Opera got going, so did Rudel, then 22. He was everything from rehearsal pianist to curtain puller to stand-in for ailing members of the chorus. In 1957, after a clash between the opera board and Erich Leinsdorf (who followed Halasz and Joseph Rosenstock) left the company without a conductor, Rudel was appointed director. The decision was made, says one board member, partly because "Julius was the only man in the place who knew where all the scenery was buried." Just as compelling was a petition from the company's musicians and singers recommending Rudel as Leinsdorf...
...merits of Indjic's showing were his own; the contributions of conductor Erich Leinsdorf fell rather short of the inspirational. While visibly concerned with keeping orchestra and soloist together, he allowed them repeatedly to part company, primarily in the second movement. Orchestral climaxes seemed halfhearted, and the solo playing (that of cellist Jules Eskin) almost mediocre. For all his apparent courtesy, Leinsdorf did little to assist the pianist in matters of detail, and in several instances appeared to intimidate Indjic into hasty exits...
...popular, overplayed works which most often reveal the real character of a conductor. Leinsdorf's accounts of the Meistersinger Prelude, the Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun, and Till Eulenspiegel, all preceding the Brahms, only further confirmed the painful facelessness of his style. Behind his strange podium histrionics and overliterate interpretations lies a dominant inability (or worse, an unwillingness) to truly communicate with his musicians. Amid this pedestrianism, most of Till's grotesque humor was lost, along with the overt charm of the Debussy Prelude. Season after season of such readings serve only to dull the sensibilities of entire...