Word: maestro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author's love and admiration for Fiedler, which should have been the book's main strength, become a liability as Dickson eschews probing Fiedler's complex personality, and instead mingles anecdotes of the maestro's famed gruffness, inflexibility and stinginess with attempts to attribute to him every good quality imaginable. Fiedler, it seems, was a difficult man to love. Rarely showing any personal warmth, he treated his three children distantly, frequently annoyed guests by refusing to pay taxi fares, and once asked Black guest artist Roberta Flack is she "did floors." Yet, lifelong didactic and male chauvinist, he managed...
...conversation with the New England Provision Company before his end-of-season bash always went: "Hello Sam? Fiedler, here. It's time for that goddam party again." But others do not appear to deserve their build-up, in spite of Dickson's chatty "he told me" style. Neither the maestro nor the family and colleagues Dickson interviewed were strong on bon mots. Certain points simply beg for detail. Dickson lauds Fiedler's genuis for selecting balanced programs, yet endlessly reiterates a generality--in this case, he writes a full page and a half without naming a single piece...
...someone had returned to me a missing part of my body!" Cellist-Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich exclaimed in Washington. The Russian é migré maestro could be excused the hyperbole. Other Soviet figures have sought artistic freedom in the West, but few could match the poignant symbolism of last week's defection drama. In a stunning rebuff to Kremlin cultural politics, the son and grandson of the Soviet Union's most celebrated contemporary composer the late Dmitri Shostakovich, decided to join Rostropovich in exile and petition the U.S. State Department for asylum...
...extraordinarily allusive imagination: forever unpicking its objects, forever recombining them. As the poet-critic Carter Ratcliff remarks at the opening of his brilliant catalogue essay on Cornell as a puritan, he was "a virtuoso of fragments, a maestro of absences. Each of his objects ... is the emblem of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box." The extreme examples of this were, perhaps, Cornell's cosmogonies-the "Soap Bubble Sets," made in the '40s and early '50s. The metaphor on which they rely is simple, even banal: a likeness between soap bubbles...
...Detroit has a world-class orchestra that is supported in a provincial way," huffed Detroit Symphony Orchestra Conductor Antal Dorati in an open letter to Orchestra Chairman Robert B. Semple. Therefore, said the maestro with characteristic bravado, I quit. Under Dorati, who arrived three years ago, the D.S.O. has become one of the crown jewels of the struggling "Detroit renaissance." So Semple acted fast. In a six-way conference call with Dorati at his home in Switzerland, board members urged the maestro to come back, at least for this season. Pleased with the furor he had created, Dorati agreed...