Word: maestro
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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During a rehearsal of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, Britain's trigger-tempered maestro, Sir Thomas Beecham, an irascible 77, soothed himself by trying to make music on a sheng, an old wind that few modern Chinese blow good. The cluster of fluty pipes had been presented to Beecham, himself no mean player of the piano and trombone, by touring orchestra members of Red China's Variety Theater...
Professionally, Callas is just as ruthless. This year she broke with the maestro who helped her first and most, Conductor Serafin. Her complaint: he recorded Traviata with another soprano. Her decision automatically eliminates Serafin from his old job as conductor for her opera recordings and the old man is finding that other singers are now mysteriously unable to sing under him. Says he: "She is like a devil with evil instincts." Says La Callas: "I understand hate; I respect revenge. You have to defend yourself. You have to be strong, very, very strong. That's what makes you have...
Married. Gloria Laura Morgan Vanderbilt, 32, wan, wistful heiress (to $4,500,000), mother of two (by Maestro Leopold Stokowski), summer-stock actress, painter and poetess, whose 1955 volume, Love Poems, was dedicated "For S and the Search"; and the book's presumed dedicatee, Sidney Lumet, 32, tenement-raised onetime Broadway actor, horn-rimmed director of TV (You Are There), cinema (Twelve Angry Men) and stage (The Doctor's Dilemma); she for the third time, he for the second (his first: Cinemactress Rita Gam); in Manhattan...
...Toscanini himself. But one day in 1940, while conducting Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, Ferrara suddenly stiffened and crashed backwards off the podium in a dead faint. In the next several years he fainted so regularly on the podium that he became known throughout Italy as "The Fainting Maestro." When he consulted doctors, they could only point out what he already knew: that he lost his genial manner in the presence of music and that his nervous tension built up to a fainting spell, usually as the orchestra approached the slow movement of the symphony or concerto...
...show suffered a loss of the intimacy that the unmelancholy Dane's comic style demands. The hilarious mood of Comedy in Music was also seriously damaged by an overlong potpourri of Tchaikovsky melodies, played by a full orchestra and conducted by a Borge suddenly turned serious maestro. But despite everything, his comic talents survived the screen, and he got his deserved laughs as he coughed his way through Debussy's Claire de Lune, tangoed his way through Jealousy while sitting at the piano, doublecrossed the studio audience by playing Tea for Two off key while the audience...