Word: maestro
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...into a heroine's role. With Solti bedridden after straining a ligament in his back, Symphony Chorus Director Margaret Hillis, 56, was tapped as a last-minute stand-in to conduct a Manhattan performance of Mahler's difficult Eighth Symphony. Hillis spent an hour with the ailing maestro going over the score, listened to a radio tape of an earlier performance, and with just two days' preparation stepped up to the conductor's podium in Carnegie Hall. "I did my job; I'm surprised it caused such a stir," said Hillis after earning a standing...
...show-biz razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show had not fared well on Broadway, and the music culled from it might have passed unremarked?except that the enraptured man on the podium was the renowned cellist and magnificent maestro Mstislav Rostropovich, the N.S.O.'s new permanent conductor, Washington's grandest new monument...
Orchestra musicians are bewitched as much by his personality as by his musicianship. He insists that his players call him Slava, not maestro. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick...
...they swarmed. Supposedly the young groupies, who numbered in the hundreds, lined up at the box office each week at four in the afternoon; by eight, the line trailed blocks away. After the concert, reports one biographer, the youngsters would loiter in the backstage area just to brush the maestro's sleeve as he hurried to his limousine. None of the extramusical sycophancy would have turned Stokowski's head. He was unjustly thought an egotist because of his theatrics on the podium, his links with wealthy and glamorous Hollywood women and his self-styled revolutionary manner. But even the indefensible...
...49th Independence Day appearance, the Boston Pops, under the masterful baton of maestro Arthur Fiedler, sparked the evening festivities with a 90-minute concert of marches, popular tunes and classical works...