Word: conductor
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Carmen is a tattooed nightclub singer in a Tina Turner wig who smuggles Uzis after hours. Escamillo, her bullfighting boyfriend, looks as if he's been getting fashion tips from Wayne Newton's tailor. The orchestra is seated onstage, midway between five video screens and six hydraulic lifts; the conductor wears a leather vest, and the director's credits include a stint as Mick Jagger's choreographer. And everybody is miked, from the tenor to the timpani player...
...Stravinsky befriended Robert Craft, a 23-year-old conductor who was to become his chronicler, interpreter and, oddly, his mentor in some ways. It was Craft who persuaded Stravinsky to take a more sympathetic view of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone school, which led to Stravinsky's last great stylistic development...
...studio recordings he made, and despite the hundreds of glories he left behind--from I'll Never Smile Again of 1940 to Hey Look, No Crying of 1981--there were songs that eluded him till the end. Studio outtakes and bootlegs show him chiding the arranger, bugging the conductor, riding the band and beating up on himself with a good-humored swagger that doesn't hide the disappointment and frustration that are chewing him up. You can hear the defeat in his voice, as if he had lost a chance at lasting love...
...band in the early '40s, he kept on tap a voice teacher who was a former opera singer. Later on he would turn to Metropolitan Opera soprano Dorothy Kirsten and baritone Robert Merrill for pointers on technique. "He knew they knew...how to maintain the equipment," Sinatra's longtime conductor, Vincent Falcone, told writer Will Friedwald. That stuff in the whiskey tumbler he used onstage was often tea. Booze, he knew, could batter the throat...
Eric Tipler '99, conductor of the BSO, communicated with the orchestra and Russell so skillfully that not only was Russell presented as a guest soloist, but during the interludes, the Bach Soc seemed a soloist by itself. Ever so delicately, Russell and the orchestra started the Adagio, the orchestra gently backing up Russell's beautifully fragile tone. A soul's love song, the Adagio, became Russell's song, putting heartfelt emotion into each note as he rocked gently back and forth to the music. What was most beautiful about this movement was the way in which Russell sustained the upper...