Word: conductor
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...midafternoon, the carpets had not been tacked, some of the seats were not bolted down, the stair railings were still being sanded. Six hours later, after some 800 hired limousines had converged on the area, braying their way through the clogged streets. New York Philharmonic Conductor Leonard Bernstein mounted the podium, bowed to the audience and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, and set the hall ablaze with sound. There would be better nights of music at Philharmonic Hall-the opening night's program was more an acoustical than an artistic success-but there would be no nights more glittering...
Barnum-Sized Bushel. As the first building completed in the 14-acre, $142 million Lincoln Center complex, Philharmonic Hall attracted to its stage last week a Barnum-sized bushel of musical talent. On opening night, Conductor Bernstein used not only the Philharmonic but also three choruses (the Juilliard, Schola Cantorum, and Columbus Boychoir) and twelve top-priced soloists, including Tenors Richard Tucker and Jon Vickers, Soprano Eileen Farrell and Mezzo-Soprano Shirley Verrett-Carter. The Philharmonic was followed in later programs by the Boston, the Philadelphia and the Cleveland orchestras, by the New York Pro Musica, the Juilliard String Quartet...
Musically, perhaps the most distinguished evenings of the week were provided by the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and the Boston Symphony, which not only played superbly under its new conductor, Erich Leinsdorf (see below), but included in its program what proved to be the week's most distinguished première-Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto, with John Browning as soloist, Composers Copland, Walter Piston and William Bergsma had also provided opening-week pieces, all of them competent occasional music (Copland's brassy, sinewy Connotations for Orchestra, Piston's stately Lincoln Center Festival Overture, Bergsma...
...years, audiences attending the weekly concerts of the Boston Symphony had stared at the unruly, silvering thatch of Conductor Charles Munch; for 25 years before that, the thatch had been that of Conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Last week, when the Boston appeared at Manhattan's new Philharmonic Hall, the man on the podium was Erich Leinsdorf-thatchless and in impeccable control of his orchestra. Few who listened doubted that one of the most distinguished eras in the orchestra's history had begun...
...irate onlookers protested to train officials, but the conductor insisted that he could do nothing. The visitors, he explained, were not subject to Soviet law; the nude gambolers were the losers in a decadent Western game that the Americans called "strip poker." Among stilyagi, the Soviet Teddy boys on whom Komsomolskaya Pravda lavishes most of its sermons, it could catch on like the Twist...