Word: conductor
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Singing Syndromes. There are no prompters in a Caldwell production, and singers are forbidden to take cues from the conductor, thus freeing opera from one of its prime embarrassments: the I'm-singing-to-her-but-I'm-looking-at-him syndrome. She strives for drama as well as spectacle; when her spear carriers enter, it is with a flash of steel and a purpose. She knows all the languages of opera, knows music so well that she often conducts. She pursues authenticity and realism to the point of demanding old chains instead of new rope...
...hardly the sort of setting or audience usually associated with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. While the orchestra sat in the center of a large gymnasium, the listeners squatted or sprawled on the bare floor. Occasionally they waved their hands in imitation of the conductor, sang along with the music or uninhibitedly ran their fingers across the strings of a cello. They were young children, attending last week's Tiny Tot Concert, an annual series sponsored by Rich's department store in Atlanta. Rich's does not expect the children to be customers for quite a while...
...windup Leonard Bernstein? Whatever it was, a machine conducted the New York Philharmonic last week in a performance of John Cage's Atlas Elipticalis with Winter Music (Electronic Version). And considering what it was conducting, it probably did every bit as well as any human conductor could...
...Wolpe's First Symphony was equally iconoclastic and prefaced by an even airier speech. Wolpe had written it in 1956, had never been able to get an orchestra to tackle what Bernstein called this "unperform-able work." Finally, after Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg-a mathematician as well as a conductor-agreed to take the podium, it went into rehearsal. It was still too much for the Philharmonic, which attempted only the first two movements (Not Too Slow and Charged). The symphony rapidly disintegrated into fragments of non-melody and non-rhythm. Long passages sounded like a busy Saturday morning...
...composer-and a complete musician. He wrote music, as Albert Einstein once said, "as a tree bears fruit"-great bushels of music, turned out in orderly, workmanlike style. He was a concert violist and pianist, a competent player of every other instrument in the orchestra, and a greatly admired conductor. In a single day at the Berlin Festival in 1960, Hindemith conducted four choirs, played a three-string vielle in a recital of 14th century songs, then sat back to listen to the world première of his Motets for Tenor and Piano. "Almost overpoweringly impressive," wrote Die Welt...