Word: maestro
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...Ready, Maestro? For Victor, as for any company recording during the summer festival season, the toughest problem is one of simple logistics: how to get singers, orchestra, engineers and equipment in the same place at the same time. Victor's chartmakers spent all winter planning recording schedules. The company transformed the Rome Opera's marble-floored foyer into a sound booth lined with $50,000 worth of triple-track tape recorders, loudspeakers, amplifiers and oscillators. With promotion and distribution costs, Victor figures to sink $250,000 in Butterfly with a relatively unknown cast of young singers headed...
...Ready, maestro?" Mohr would say into the mike. "Very quiet, please. Take One ... Take Two . . . Take Three." In Butterfly the takes sometimes lasted less than a minute, sometimes ran for as much as twelve minutes. Later, in the control foyer, the singers listened in anguish to the playbacks while Mohr kept up a running commentary: "That's too heavy there, Anna; in the next line you can be as tragic as you wish. You're weighing it down a little, maestro. Diction, diction. It's ECCO, Anna, not echo. We must hear every word...
Public & Private. The project was the idea of Czech-born Conductor Franz Allers. 51, a maestro of melting musical-comedy scores (Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon). Conductor Allers yearned for meatier material, and in 1947 he persuaded a bunch of the boys from the Brigadoon pit to get together in off-hours to try their hand at a little Debussy, Mozart and Beethoven. When Allers took over the baton in Fair Lady, some of the singers asked him to continue his out-of-hours musicmaking. Result: the Allers opera workshop, which in short order sang, without sets or costumes, Mozart...
...occasional comment ("We all know we can sing very loud; now let's see if we can put it together''). At the last chords, they were five minutes over their scheduled time. "Late as usual," said Franz Allers, as everyone started for the door. "Thank you. Maestro," said a baritone, stuffing his score into a coat pocket. They rushed out together to bolt a sandwich before turning their attention from Puccini's Montmartre to Edwardian London and ''O, wouldn't it be loverly...
...love for Bach finally brought him out of retirement. In 1950, on the 200th anniversary of Bach's death, Violinist Alexander Schneider, a Casals protege, persuaded El Maestro to take part in a Bach festival in Prades. From all over the world famed soloists-Joseph Szigeti. Isaac Stern. Rudolf Serkin-poured into the village on the slopes of the Pyrenees to play with the man Fritz Kreisler had called "the best who draws...