Word: conductors
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...much the same way that his mentor and predecessor Andropov was a skillful conductor of the anti-Euromissile campaign, Gorbachev is likely to be a deft opponent of Star Wars. Once again, the campaign will be pitched largely to the West Europeans who are skittish about the possibility that Star Wars research will lead to testing and deployment of systems that will provoke a new, extraterrestrial arms race...
...conductor of one of the country's greatest orchestras, he cut a decidedly unglamorous figure. "I'm one of the boys, no better than the last second violinist," he would say with typical self-effacement. "I'm just the lucky one to be standing in the center, telling them how to play." His businesslike podium manner and his reliable but unspectacular interpretations of the standard repertory caused many to underestimate him. But in 44 years, the longest music directorship in American history, Eugene Ormandy led the Philadelphia Orchestra to a height of tonal splendor that...
Ormandy's death last week of pneumonia at 85 closed an important chapter of American orchestral history. Before jet travel, conductors routinely spent years in one city, patiently establishing performance traditions; by contrast, a modern music director may lead two or three orchestras at once, allocating only a few weeks a year to each. "This new crop of conductors is marvelously talented, and so eager to make a success in two minutes," Ormandy once said. "There is a very famous one who wants one leg in Berlin, one in London, one hand in Florence, the other in Paris...
When he took over in 1938, the stocky, diminutive (5-ft. 5-in.) Hungarian- born conductor (real name: Jeno Blau) was an unlikely candidate for a daunting task. His father, a Budapest dentist and an amateur violinist, put a fiddle in his son's hands when the child was four, and for a time Ormandy seemed destined for the life of a touring virtuoso. Stranded in America after a promised concert tour failed to materialize, he was nearly penniless when he drifted into New York City's Capitol Theater and landed a job in the pit orchestra in 1921. Within...
...himself, which was everything. "People say to members of my orchestra, 'How do you keep up such a demanding schedule?' and my players--my beloved players--reply, 'If the old man can do it, we can do it.' That's my philosophy," he once said. "If the conductor gives, the orchestra gives. If the conductor rests, why should the players...