Word: conductor
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...interrupted by World War I service in the Austrian army. He abandoned the score for more than 20 years, returned to it in 1945 but never finished it. At the request of Gertrude Schoenberg, the composer's widow, the score was prepared for performance by Composer-Conductor Winfried Zillig after a painstaking study of Schoenberg's musical sketchbook. A onetime student of Schoenberg's, Zillig claims that the score as played in Vienna "contains not a single note that is not by Schoenberg himself...
...auditorium is tiny, cluttered and creaky with age. Spectators in the front row run the danger of being skewered by the conductor's baton, and a singer who wants to be heard has to shout down the throat of the tuba. But despite such drawbacks, the audience at Manhattan's Xavier Theater last week saw and heard as fine a revival of Gian-Carlo Menotti's stark Greenwich Village drama. The Saint of Bleecker Street, as the opera is likely to receive. What made the production even more surprising was that not one of the professional performers...
Personal Underground. The Xavier Theater (700 seats) in lower Manhattan is one of two headquarters of a remarkable organization-the Xavier Symphony Society. The society's other headquarters: a Broadway hotel room from which Conductor Vincent La Selva dispatches telephoned entreaties to a kind of personal underground consisting of about 300 musicians. From this list he recruits the orchestra he needs for any of the Xavier Society's free concerts or opera productions. Since the musicians all play for the fun of it, La Selva is never quite sure how much of his orchestra will turn...
...Conductor La Selva, 31, is far more than a musical talent scout-as last week's performance demonstrated. He whipped his orchestra through a fiery performance that seemed to burn with fresh brilliance along Menotti's arching melodic lines. Moreover, La Selva kept his singers working in fine coordination with the orchestra as he cued their entrances with a fiercely stabbing finger, a violent toss of his head. At opera's end Composer Menotti, who had watched misty-eyed, rushed backstage to embrace La Selva. "I was," said a surprised Menotti, "extremely moved...
After last week's performance, Conductor La Selva looked more than usually harried as he took his customary bow: he had just learned that he had lost his trombone section, and he wanted to get on the phone...