Word: lamoureux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this well-known two-liner has long exemplified the anarchy that is the Parisian orchestra. Symphonic life in Paris has almost always been a laughing matter for the rest of the world. Underfinanced, undertalented and underrehearsed, the city's three major, privately backed, week-to-week orchestras (Lamoureux, Colonne and Pasdeloup) slog through their Sunday afternoon old-hat concerts with all the esprit de corpse of Napoleon's army after Moscow. Parisian conservatories turn out some of the best instrumentalists in the world, but they have very little incentive to remain at home. Arturo Toscanini once remarked that...
...MAJOR (Philips). A rare and rewarding encounter between the neoclassicist Stravinsky and the romantic David Oistrakh. Oistrakh gaily sets off short rhythmic explosions in the Toccata and Capriccio and then lets the melodies pour out in the two calm stretches called arias. Conductor Bernard Haitink and the Lamoureux Orchestra are also attuned to every instantaneous change in the musical weather...
...stops, Conductor Igor Markevitch cuts loose. For quick relief from artistic discipline, he unlimbers his tongue. Occasionally his cutting comments have helped cost him a job. "Paris musicians," he announced, "are a Mafia." Markevitch played several variations on the same theme, and was forced to resign from Paris' Lamoureux Orchestra a year ago. Last week, in Tel Aviv, where he appeared as guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic, he sounded off at the drop of a question. This time he casually blasted his baton-wielding colleagues...
Markevitch now juggles two orchestras, the Lamoureux and the Montreal Symphony, spends the rest of his time guest conducting about the world and teaching. His special interest is working out a more exact conducting vocabulary; strictly defined movements by the conductor, he feels, ought to evoke a strictly standardized response from the orchestra. But he is also concerned about the response of his music-glutted audiences. "To have Beethoven coming out of the radio tap from morning to night," says Markevitch, "is worse than not knowing Beethoven...