Word: leginska
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...thin, middle-aged woman stood in the darkened pit at the Chicago Opera House last week, waving a baton as if she believed it possessed some superhuman power. Her eyes blazed. She tossed her bushy head this way & that, pointed vigorous commands to the singers on the stage. Ethel Leginska had good reason to make much of the music, because she had written it. Hers was the distinction of being the world's first woman to conduct her own opera in an important opera house...
...novel named The Haunting. Scene is a village in Cornwall where Gale and his young sailor brother Pascoe quarrel over a hoard of gold hidden in an ancient chest. The beginning is gay with folk tunes. Villagers dance in the market place. Thereafter gloom prevails. Gale, for whom Leginska named her opera, murders his brother, hides the body in a cave near the sea, never succeeds in escaping its ghost...
Although Composer Leginska's music is sometimes turgidly slow, it is on the whole superior to the story she chose and to the Chicago City Opera's blundering production. Well-knit and melodious, the music often gives a real feeling of the sea as it beats against the chalk cliffs of the Cornwall coast. Leginska worked like a fury at rehearsals, got telling results from orchestramen. It was not her fault that the performance began a half hour late, that Morwenna, supposedly a middle-aged character, was mistaken for the youthful heroine or that Baritone John Charles Thomas...
...list of mediocres. For his trump cards this season Longone will present Lehmann in Der Rosenkavalier, Prague's Mila Kocava in her U. S. debut, pretty Helen Jepson as the profligate Thais, the U. S. premiere of Respighi's La Fiamma, the world premiere of Ethel Leginska's Gale with John Charles Thomas singing and the bushy-haired composer conducting...
When Ethel Leginska decided ten years ago that she would be a conductor, musicians and laymen regarded her as an eccentric, a publicity seeker who was ambitious beyond her sex. Leginska pioneered valiantly if erratically, proved that women could wave a baton as capably as they could play the harp or violin. Last week, by coincidence, two lady conductors turned ambitious backs in Manhattan's Town Hall...