Word: leopold
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DIED. Leopold Stokowski, 95, irreverent, in novative conductor whose career spanned 70 years and some 7,000 concerts; of a heart attack; in Nether Wallop, England (see MUSIC...
...Leopold Stokowski...
...hands became a legend, and he kept them in the spotlight, even when his players were in penumbral gloom. In his mind's ear he heard orchestral sounds never made before-and proceeded to make them. "Music appeals to me for what can be done with it," Leopold Stokowski once remarked. By that he meant that he knew better than Beethoven or Brahms how instruments should sound, and that Johann Sebastian Bach surely would have loved his lush orchestral transcriptions of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. For such arrogance-and for the skill with which he argued...
MORE DISQUIETED than the man without a country, more stifled than the rebel without a cause, is the conductor without an orchestra. In the case of Leopold Stokowski, whose repeated misfortune it was to be without that sine qua non, the void had a peculiar poignancy. It didn't matter that Stokowski was perhaps the greatest innovative genius on the podium. Or that when he conducted, box office receipts soared. In the end his alleged ruthlessness would eclipse them, and prompt a dark ending to one orchestral link after another...
Thus ends for Cincinnati, at least, the drum and cymbal career of Leopold Stokowski, who made Beethoven dance on his ears; who made Brahms a puling, sickly sentimentalist; who calcined Strauss in more clashing and fighting colors than Strauss ever knew; and who Stokowski-ized each composer whom he took into his directorial hands...