Word: lorin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ranking orchestras is a dubious business, but it would be incorrect to say the Boston Symphony is the best in the U.S., or even that there is a Big Five any more. The Cleveland Orchestra, under Lorin Maazel, has become the most beautifully balanced American ensemble, with the richest, warmest sound. The sheer virtuosity of Sir Georg Solti's Chicago Symphony is without peer domestically, whatever Solti's interpretive excesses. The other two members of the Big Five are the Philadelphia Orchestra, once magnificent but facing an uncertain future in the hands of its new music director, Riccardo...
Despite the musical ambition implicit in the international cast and the Paris Opera name (Bergman used an all-Swedish cast for his Magic Flute), this Don Giovanni is musically undistinguished. Lorin Maazel's conducting sounds muddy and sluggish throughout--which could easily be the fault of the Exeter Street's Rocky Horror-blasted sound system. None of the singers does very much of the ornamentation most music scholars today believe was a critical part of performances in the composer's time. Most of all, there's a surprisingly lackadaisical air about Mozart's music as Losey presents it--as though...
...Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey's heavy seriousness. Missing are the wit and verve, the "elate darting rhythms" with which Shaw said Mozart conveyed the spirit of the work. Here the music is not as much help as it might be, since Lorin Maazel conducts it with such grim, unrelenting drive. (The complete soundtrack has been released in a three-LP set by Columbia...
...Viennese are going through transition too. Shortly before the company left Vienna, it announced that Director Egon Seefehlner, 67, would retire and Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Lorin Maazel, 49, would take over in the 1982-83 season. Maazel is the first American to be entrusted with the company's treasured legacy. Possibly his appointment signals a desire by the Viennese to open up that legacy to new influences. One hopes so. The operas brought to Washington are all great works; but they are also cultural totems, safe and certified, and this reflects a basic conservatism in the company...
...this is Friday, that must be the touring Cleveland Orchestra that Lorin Maazel, 49, is conducting at London's Royal Festival Hall. Maazel, who is fluent in English, French and German, also works with the French Orchestre National and has agreed as well to direct and conduct at Vienna's hallowed State Opera. When he begins his pit stops there in 1982, Maazel will face the unusually intense musical politics that have made Vienna the bane of conductors. So great is the municipal love of music that even the orchestra members, drawn from the Vienna Philharmonic...