Word: impresarios
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Tatum never meant to be a professional basketball player. But Abe Saperstein, the sapient impresario of the Globe Trotters, happened to see him playing first base with Cincinnati's Negro American League Ethiopian Clowns last summer. Last week Tatum's extensible equipment was helping the Globe Trotters to be one of the most successful professional basketball teams...
Pinza, who has been singing at the Met for 16 years, is the answer to an impresario's prayer. He can sing any of 55 operatic roles at a few hours' notice. He has no objection to playing minor roles, usually succeeds in making them seem major. No scene-stealer, he can be counted on to help inexperienced members of the cast. A wonderful example of what the Italians call a basso cantante ("singing bass"), he combines baritone agility with bass sonority and boom. That voice, at the Metropolitan and in concert tours, grosses between...
...brakeman on a railroad, then got a chance to sing King Mark in Tristan und Isolde at the Teatro Reale dell' Opera in Rome. Soon his reputation was made. Arturo Toscanini gave him a contract at Milan's famed La Scala opera house. There the late impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed him for the Metropolitan. Last year, despite the fact that Basso Pinza had his first citizenship papers, the FBI got irritated at some patriotic Italian speeches he had made, interned him, but released him eleven weeks later...
...hundred years ago this week, a Connecticut Yankee named Ureli Corelli Hill* launched the Philharmonic Society of New York. Impresario Hill, who looked something like a burlesque Irishman, could not find a second trumpet player. But with a dauntless lack of finesse the Philharmonic gave its first program in the gaslit Apollo Rooms on Lower Broadway: Beethoven's Fifth (V for Victory) Symphony, Weber's Oberon Overture and a Gargantuan assortment of operatic arias sung by a lady named Madame Otto. To finance his first season, Ureli Corelli Hill persuaded each man in the orchestra to chip...
Even the most astute of Manhattan musical managers prophesied that Impresario Monath's funereally earnest concert-giving would end in a bust. But Manhattan concertgoers bought out 97% of the first season's tickets before she had even presented her first concert. Today, the New Friends still operate without the help of wealthy patrons, still qualify as one of the very few entirely self-supporting high-brow musical institutions...