Word: conductor
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...conductor's baton is the original magic wand. Give it to a broken-down piano player and presto!-up pops a shaggy-haired genius, a leader of men, God's gift to music...
...says Gregor Piatigorsky, who in 40 years as one of the world's great cellists has played under more than 300 conductors-and has yet to meet "one who suffers from an inferiority complex." In a soon-to-be published book called Cellist, excerpted in last week's Saturday Review, Piatigorsky writes a delightfully incisive analysis of wandmanship. The conductor's role, he argues, has grown out of all reasonable proportions. "The focus of attention" he says, "has shifted from prima donna, prima ballerina and the virtuoso to a conductor, who, as a performer, has become...
Piatigorsky notes that many a conductor who seems "desperately in love with music" was not notably enraptured by it when he was an obscure member of the orchestra. The maestro simply develops a keen sense of ownership: "Isn't my orchestra wonderful? Do you know my Ravel, my Tchaikovsky, my Brahms?" All the same, Piatigorsky asks: "How is it that a man who never conducted or studied conducting is capable of giving an acceptable performance without warning and on the spur of the moment? No one can expect a comparable feat on any instrument...
...charmer, a speaker, an organizer and a bridge player. His own family life must be irreproachably pure, and at times a single mistake like poor concealment of pornographic material in his luggage, or introducing as his wife a lady who wasn't, has cost a prominent conductor...
Since the theater's arena stage has no orchestra pit, Conductor Thomas Nee had to direct his 30 musicians behind a scrim curtain at the rear of the set. He followed the action over stereophonic earphones, delivered his cues to a closed-circuit TV camera that the cast monitored on two concealed screens...