Word: firebrands
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...embodied Wall Street's gold-rush spirit of the 1980s more than Peter Cohen, the high-strung chairman of the investment firm Shearson Lehman Hutton. A short, cigar-smoking firebrand, Cohen transformed Shearson from a stolid retail brokerage into an investment-banking giant. Backed by American Express, which bought the firm for $360 million in 1981, Shearson grew from 11,000 employees to 47,000 by the mid-'80s. But Cohen's expansion drive proved unstable. Hurt by several missteps and the slowing pace of Wall Street dealmaking, Shearson's investment-banking revenue declined 27% last year, to $963 million...
Credit for all this goes to Museveni, 45, the self-described freedom fighter whose National Resistance Army triumphantly entered an exhausted Kampala after five years of guerrilla war against a series of brief governments that succeeded Amin's. Once a firebrand student of economics and politics at Tanzania's University of Dar es Salaam, Museveni was regarded with some trepidation in Western capitals when he emerged from the bush. Now the assessment is almost unanimously positive. Museveni, says a U.S. diplomat in Kampala, has been "a very effective leader. He has subdued tribal rebels in the north, instituted a sort...
...hardly a firebrand. He still holds three youth posts at the university. And he intends to apply for membership in the Communist Party soon. "I idolize the party just as Christians do their religion," he said. "If China must establish some ideology, we should rely on the party...
Initially, Walesa seemed far different from the charismatic union firebrand of eight years ago. Though he spoke of "revolution, and a bloody one" if authorities failed to make concessions, Walesa, 44, sought no leadership role, remaining a subdued, even ambivalent participant. Said he: "It is time for younger people." His reluctance stemmed in part from a conviction that reforms not drastically different from those proposed by the regime are necessary for the rescue of Poland's devastated economy. Walesa believes that such a program must be carried out with far broader popular consultation than $ Jaruzelski is willing to permit. Walesa...
...festival offers some discoveries, however. Leningrad Composer Andrei Petrov's 1980 Violin Concerto is a sturdy showpiece that picks up momentum from its opening recitative to its blazing vivo finale; it got an otherworldly performance from Soloist Sergei Stadler, a baby-faced firebrand who shared first prize in the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition with Viktoria Mullova. Sergei Slonimsky's sprightly two-minute Novgorod Dance -- hellzapoppin', cossack- style, ending with the clarinetist, trombonist, cellist, pianist and conductor all merrily hoofing it around the stage -- bespeaks a composer with both an ear and a sense of humor. Best of all is Schnittke...