Word: conductors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time, trouble and expense of mounting the opera for the first time in its 90-year history? Fair questions, which were not entirely answered by the premiere performance at Lincoln Center last week. Yet the Met's brief for Vespri contains any number of good points. Conductor James Levine and Stage Director John Dexter eliminated a half-hour's worth of ballet (wisely, considering the Met's declivity for dance) and edited the work down to three acts, running a relatively tidy 3½ hours. Then there were the principal singers: Sopra no Montserrat Caballe, Tenor Nicolai...
...Isolde pleading illness. Nilsson was busy elsewhere. Then Tenor Jon Vickers, who seems to tremble before Wagner but may just possibly be the Tristan everyone at the Met (including Nilsson) has been waiting for, begged out of his first two performances-he wanted more time. Not to be outdone, Conductor Erich Leinsdorf threatened to resign, complaining that he could not get decisions from the besieged opera house, but then relented and stayed...
...Moscow psychiatrist leaned forward intently. "You will write your concerto," he intoned. "You will work with great facility ... The concerto will be of excellent quality." On the couch lay Sergei Rachmaninoff, 27, in a hypnotic trance. At the time (1900) Rachmaninoff was noted as a pianist and conductor. But as a composer he was notorious. His First Symphony had been premiered three years earlier to unanimous disapproval, so shattering his confidence that in the time since he had been unable to compose at all. Of his monumental block, Rachmaninoff recalled years later: "I felt like a man who had suffered...
...Prelude from Bach's Violin Partita in E and the Scherzo from Men delssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is the finest recording ever made of Schumann's Carnaval, astonishingly warm and realistic in sound quality despite its 1929 vintage. Rachmaninoff the conductor is also represented, leading the Philadelphia in effective readings of his soulful Third Symphony (1939) and brooding Isle of the Dead...
Last year Lichtenstein hired Composer-Conductor Lukas Foss as director of the Academy's orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonia. Jazz, blues and gospel are heard throughout the year in the Black People's Music program, highlighted each fall by a festival of performing groups from Africa and Asia...