Word: firebird
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...concert in Madrid, the lights went out during a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird; the orchestra played on in the dark from memory. When a flight to Luxembourg was canceled, the orchestra arrived by bus 15 minutes before concert time and with no luggage. The musicians played in sweaters and slacks. In Seville, the orchestra arrived during a flood (the concert became a benefit for flood victims), and in Aleppo, Syria, a bomb exploded outside the hall during the concert. Inside, the orchestra played calmly through a new orchestral version of the Syrian national anthem, hastily drafted...
Along with Anderson, the general run of "contemporary" (post-1900) composers come off remarkably well in the B.M.I. survey; they wrote almost two-thirds of the works played by U.S. orchestras last season. Serge Prokofiev was the most-played contemporary, and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite was the most-played contemporary composition. But that still left Serge, Igor and Leroy Anderson several long leagues behind the perennial alltime favorite: Ludwig van Beethoven. Music lovers could take some comfort from the fact that last season Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto was played just 40.3 times as often as Anderson...
...expect me to see an oblong pond." On another humorously humorless occasion, the poet deputed a vampire to plague one of his enemies. The reckless, insane logic of the spirit world sometimes pursued Yeats far beyond the seance rooms. Years after his long, frustrated courtship of the hauntingly lovely firebird of the Irish Troubles, Maud Gonne, had ended with her marriage to another man, the fortyish Yeats showed up in her home on the coast of France and promptly proposed marriage to Maud Gonne's eleven-year-old daughter, a scene that might bring pause even to the imagination...
...conducting; Columbia, 3 LPs). This labor of love and profit offers Stravinsky's own readings of Le Sacre du Printemps and Petroushka, plus his recorded commentary on the composition of Le Sacre ("The idea of Le Sacre du Printemps came to me while I was still composing ze Firebird"). The performances have his expectable tautness and clarity. The accompanying text and pictures make the album a fitting tribute to one of modern music's living monuments...
Clubs & Violins. Next day, with Bernstein still sick, Millar conducted the Schumann again, while on the same program Shapira took over Beethoven's "Leonore" Overture and Stanger led Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. All of them, the audience agreed, sounded first-rate. Said one Bernstein...