Word: maestro
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...Unhappily, the light fails, for almost all the main characters are inept performers whose unmarked faces cannot register more than satiety and fatigue. The fault lies partly with the director. In the Fellini version, the actors literally performed by saying the numbers. "It was a multilingual cast," says the maestro. "So instead of having them speak dialogue, I often just had them count one, two, three." Hiram Keller, recruited from the Broadway production of Hair to play Encolpius' intimate, Ascyltus, was given instructions of equal subtlety: "You are evil and you lay everything in sight...
...Maestro's Strength. Yet in so plotless a pastiche, the population matters less than the imagination that propels it. That quality the film has in superabundance. Fellini's style is less theatrical than amphitheatrical. Colossal grotesques leap from private fantasy to public mind. In a set daubed with indelible cerulean and blood red, an albino hermaphrodite possessed of occult powers is abducted-only to wither pitifully in the desert. A quadruple amputee somehow manages a deep...
...parabola of grandeur, complete with elaborate jokes and hoaxes. It is an occasion as bizarre and funny as the film's conclusion-in which a lady leaves a fortune to friends, with the proviso that they dissect her corpse and eat it. As always, the maestro's greatest strength is anecdotal. His account of a patrician husband and wife who commit suicide rather than submit to imprisonment is as affecting as the short tales of La Dolce Vita. His story of the adventures of a woman and the corpse of her husband is neoclassic black comedy...
...Clyde Key is doing his best to keep that promise. For years he has scoured the U.S. and Europe for off-the-air transcriptions of Toscanini broadcasts. Key now owns 5,000 transcriptions (all transferred to tape) of hitherto commercially unreleased material-a complete catalogue of broadcasts by the Maestro between 1933 and 1954. It also includes about 50 concerts that were never broadcast, but which were recorded surreptitiously by engineers supposedly testing their equipment. Last year Key launched the Arturo Toscanini Society. A private, nonprofit club based in Dumas, Texas, it offers members (about 500 so far) five...
Because the Arturo Toscanini Society is nonprofit, Key believes he has successfully bypassed both copyright restrictions and the maze of contractual ties between RCA and the Maestro's family. Last week, RCA's attorneys were looking into the matter to see if they agree with Key. As long as it stays small, the Toscanini Society appears to offer little real competition to RCA. But classical-LP profits are so low these days, and piracy by fly-by-night firms so prevalent within the industry (an estimated $100 million in tape sales for 1969 alone), that even a benevolent...