Word: londoners
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With prospective fortunes to liven interest (a gas-company worker once took a flutter for 10? and won $295,180), crowds at the games dwarf the crowds that turn out for U.S. sport events. When Scotland played (and beat) England two months ago, a throng of 150,000 crammed London's Wembley Stadium to see it done...
Beams & Bows. At the third concert of the tour, when the Philadelphia's pint-sized conductor strode toward the podium in London's huge Royal Albert Hall before a glittering audience of 7,000, he got only scant applause. Most were watching the royal box, where Queen Elizabeth was just making her own arrival. But an hour later, when Ormandy had brought Brahms's Symphony No. i to a resounding end, the applause came heavy and this time it was all for Ormandy and the orchestra. And when he finished the program with Ravel's Daphnis...
Bouquets & Brickbats. Not so melted were London critics. The Manchester Guardian and London Daily Telegraph were unstinting in their praise. But the Times had a brickbat in its bouquet: "The virtuosity of the execution is astonishing. But equally . . . astonishing was the lack of [interpretive] imagination . . . Brahms's First Symphony opened with an assertion of fact, not the declaration of a mystery . . . Brahms might have written the symphony for a motion picture." Even so, on second thought, the Times admitted English orchestras suffered by comparison...
...popular London press was more intrigued with money matters. Headlined the Daily Mirror: WORLD'S GREATEST ORCHESTRA IS HERE-MUST IT BE A FLOP...
That was a fair question. The box-office future had looked dark, but slashing ticket prices up to 50% had brightened things considerably. Conductor Ormandy was not worried: the tour, and the Philadelphia's nearly $16,000-a-week payroll (duly noted by the London press) was guaranteed. Hardly worried. either was the guarantor-handsome, 31-year-old British Impresario Harold Fielding, who stood to make up in publicity and prestige what he would shell out of his pocket. Moreover, on a turnabout's-fair-play basis, U.S. Music Czar James Caesar Petrillo would welcome British orchestras...