Word: first
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...opera fans the first public appearance of a new soprano or tenor is as exciting as the trial spin of a new Class-J sloop is to yachtsmen. Last week Manhattan's debutasters trooped to the Metropolitan Opera House to size up the beam, rig and probable speed of two of the Metropolitan's brand-new singers. Chicago operagoers had already bravoed both of them long ago. But that was not enough for Manhattan. For every standee at the Metropolitan regards himself as a member of opera's supreme court, delights to reverse or qualify the opinions...
...First new voice to be launched was Wisconsin-born Tenor Eyvind Laholm's (real name: Johan Edwin Johnson). Tenor Laholm had already spent 14 years making himself one of the most famed Wagnerian tenors in Germany, had won personal applause from musical Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. But until two years ago, when he became Hitler's favorite singer, he was practically unknown in the U. S. Egg-bald Laholm, 40, an ex-boxer and heavyweight title holder in the U. S. Navy, exchanged his everyday toupee for a luxuriant blond Nibelung mop and took the stage as Siegmund, leaped...
Last week Arturo Toscanini, having finished off his first series of broadcasts with Radio City's NBC Symphony, hopped off to California for a rest. His place was taken by another little white-haired maestro, this time one unfamiliar to U. S. audiences. The new maestro, who had just defied bombs and mines on the S. S. Vulcama, for his chance to conduct the NBCers, was Belgium's No. i Conductor Désiré Defauw (pronounced Defoe). Driving the orchestra at top speed, with its cut-out open, through a broadcast of light French and Belgian pieces...
...devotees of arty London Poetess Edith Sitwell, started out in the early 19205 doing clever satirical fluff. But when, in 1931, he burst from her mother-of-pearly cell with a fire-belching oratorio called Belshazzar's Feast, the international musical world sat up and took notice. His First Symphony, which followed, got him talked about in terms of Finland's Jean Sibelius...
...Violinist Jascha Heifetz asked Composer Walton to write him a violin concerto. Last spring Composer Walton delivered the completed manuscript at Heifetz' Connecticut estate, and last week in Cleveland Violinist Heifetz, with fidgety Artur Rodzinski's streamlined Cleveland Orchestra as background, gave the new concerto its first performance. Well-woven as a Paisley shawl, Composer Walton's opus proved warm as well as intricate. And though Cleveland's dowagers found its texture scratchier than crepe, Cleveland's critics fingered its solid warp & woof with enthusiasm. Said Clevelander Rodzinski, rolling a long cigaret of Polish tobacco...