Word: maestro
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DIED. Andre Kostelanetz, 78, Russian-born maestro who dedicated 50 years to popularizing orchestral music in America and American music in the world; of a heart attack; while vacationing in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Though Kostelanetz fled war-ravaged Petrograd, where he had conducted opera, for New York City in 1922, his U.S. career did not bloom until eight years later when he was hired to lead the CBS symphony orchestra on radio's Chesterfield Hour. After making the program a hit, he added to his celebrity by marrying Opera Diva Lily Pons in 1938 (they divorced...
...that lesson to use again in 1970 when he discovered an invitation on a colleague's desk announcing a cocktail party honoring the Black Panthers. The event was to be held at the Manhattan home of Maestro Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe attended, steno pad and ball point ready. The result was Radical Chic, another heretical howler that captured the well-intentioned banalities of "limousine liberals." A few years later, in The Painted Word, Wolfe took on the New York art establishment, setting forth the impish thesis that a few powerful critics controlled what was painted and sold...
DIED. Arthur Fiedler, 84, beloved maestro of the Boston Pops for a half-century; of a heart attack; in Brookline, Mass, (see Music...
...Fiedler's exaggerations, though he was not above appearing on a record jacket dressed as Santa Claus or as a jaunty Yankee Doodle dandy. Such clowning caused some highbrows to sneer. But to Boston audiences and those he visited around the country, Arthur Fiedler was Mr. Pops, the maestro of the masses...
...seemed destined to be a musician. His grandsires were musicians in Europe (Fiedler is German for fiddler), and his father, two uncles and a first cousin were all members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Fiedler joined the orchestra in 1915 as a violinist. Eager to conduct, the suave young maestro founded a series of free outdoor Esplanade concerts that are now a Boston tradition. In 1930 he was named conductor of the Boston Pops, the symphony's spring series, and proudly held that position for half a century...