Word: leinsdorf
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Musically, perhaps the most distinguished evenings of the week were provided by the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and the Boston Symphony, which not only played superbly under its new conductor, Erich Leinsdorf (see below), but included in its program what proved to be the week's most distinguished première-Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto, with John Browning as soloist, Composers Copland, Walter Piston and William Bergsma had also provided opening-week pieces, all of them competent occasional music (Copland's brassy, sinewy Connotations for Orchestra, Piston's stately Lincoln Center Festival Overture, Bergsma...
...Boston Symphony had stared at the unruly, silvering thatch of Conductor Charles Munch; for 25 years before that, the thatch had been that of Conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Last week, when the Boston appeared at Manhattan's new Philharmonic Hall, the man on the podium was Erich Leinsdorf-thatchless and in impeccable control of his orchestra. Few who listened doubted that one of the most distinguished eras in the orchestra's history had begun...
...sudden silences-Daniel Pinkham's Catacoustical Measures-to test echoes and reverberation periods. To simulate the presence of a live audience, seats were filled with pointy-headed fiber glass dummies eerily resembling hooded KKKlans-men, while such fine musical ears as Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski and Erich Leinsdorf prowled the corridors, listening critically as technicians shifted the position of acoustical panels suspended from the ceiling to correct defects. Final verdict: O.K. for sound...
...possibly to hear his name read out in the Tercentenary Theatre. Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller '17 may be there too, the Frenchman to see his building, the Dymaxionist for his 45th Reunion. The composer Elliot Carter '30 ought to have a degree by now; so perhaps should Erich Leinsdorf, the BSO's new conductor...
Conductor Leinsdorf started again after a jump of ten pages in the score to cut out some of the more tortuous vocal passages, and Baritone Edelmann came on again as Wotan, in brighter voice after his rest. Happily, they all made it to the final curtain. "I felt like the pilot who decides on a crash landing," said Leinsdorf. "We made it without the plane going up in flames...