Word: ferrara
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...popeyed, bushy-haired little man had scarcely raised his baton to signal the opening of the piano concerto's slow movement when he paled and swayed on the podium. Soloist Vera Franceschi swiftly signaled the sound engineers to stop the recording. Then she helped Conductor Franco Ferrara to a chair, plied him with black coffee. Ten minutes later he rapped the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome to silence, led them the rest of the way through a singing recording of Ildebrando Pizzetti's Canti della Stagione Alta...
...performance was an important step toward the recovery of an ailing man whom Arturo Toscanini once called "the greatest musical find of this century." Sicilian-born Conductor Ferrara, 45, guest-conducted the major orchestras of Italy in the '30s and early '40s, became his country's most famed conductor after Toscanini himself. But one day in 1940, while conducting Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, Ferrara suddenly stiffened and crashed backwards off the podium in a dead faint. In the next several years he fainted so regularly on the podium that he became known throughout Italy...
Sorrowfully, Ferrara gave up conducting, retired to a hermit-like existence. When San Francisco-born Pianist Franceschi, an old friend, arrived in Rome this spring on a recital tour, she took to visiting Ferrara to play him his favorite sonatas. Slowly she reawakened his interest, at last persuaded him to conduct an orchestra with herself as soloist for a series of recordings. Under Soloist Franceschi's watchful eye, the recordings were completed. It seemed this week that Conductor Ferrara may at last be licking his old weakness. Vera Franceschi is sure of it. She plans to bring...
...High Heart. In Ferrara, Italy, Carlo Bonuzzi, 30, flew over the town in a small plane, showered it with multicolor leaflets which read: "Dear Friends and Citizens: By sending you greetings from this plane, I wish to demonstrate that even if I have been abandoned by my wife, I do not worry about it and keep on being amused...
...great Renaissance painter and mathematician, Piero della Francesca (circa 1418-92). Legend has it that Piero was a fatherless boy who took the name of his mother Francesca. He studied at Florence, returned to Borgo San Sepolcro to get his first major commission, traveled through Italy painting in Rimini, Ferrara, Rome, Arezzo and Urbino, then settled down to spend his last 14 years in his native town compiling two mathematical treatises. Latterday Sansepolcrans prided themselves on owning three of Piero's major works, and kept alive the hope that more would one day come to light...