Word: mengelberg
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...recordings. At first its sound seems irritatingly thin and scratchy, but as the listener's ears adapt, the focus turns to Willem van Hoogstraten's white-hot, meticulously sculpted rendering of most of Beethoven's Coriolanus overture; the level of orchestral precision is breathtaking. Even more remarkable is Willem Mengelberg's spellbinding presentation in 1924 of two fragments from Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration. Mengelberg achieves an almost spiritual intimacy in the work's tender, meditative broodings and a radiant beauty in its soaring climactic passages...
...seldom go to concerts, but you could not pay me to stay away when Solti comes to New York with the Chicago Symphony." More often, Goodman is a flinty patriarch who seems to live by his own view that the conductor is seen, but the timpanist is heard. Mengelberg? "Very quirky and picky. He would rearrange the orchestra when he guest-conducted and put the percussion all the way in front, and then complain that the brasses were too loud." Dimitri Mitropoulos? "He did some very exciting things, but he let the Philharmonic deteriorate...
...Philharmonic, Conductor Pierre Boulez gave him a watch. That was like giving Soprano Birgit Nilsson a pitch pipe. As head of the Philharmonic's percussion section, Goodman has been keeping time for the orchestra for 46 years. His rolls, ruffs and drags were as familiar and indispensable to Mengelberg and Toscanini in their day as to Bernstein and Boulez in theirs. Goodman's departure this week will terminate one of the longest tenures in the history of American symphonic life. As Philharmonic Snare Drummer "Buster" Bailey puts it for the whole orchestra, "It will just never...
Retiring after no less than 46 years with the New York Philharmonic, the world's top virtuoso on the kettledrums, Saul Goodman, let fall some acerbic sidelights on conductors he has known. Willem Mengelberg: "A very arrogant man. I think he was sure he looked like Beethoven." Artur Rodzinski: "The kind of fellow who made the musicians give him a birthday party at his own house." Seiji Ozawa: "An audience eye-catcher. More than that I can't say about him." Well, one thing more: "He's an egomaniac." Tympanist Goodman's own weakness-or perhaps...
...critics ever earned their bite as honestly as Sargeant. A child prodigy, he conducted a symphony orchestra at age ten, later spent six years as a violinist and horn player with several orchestras under a succession of conductors: Walter Damrosch, Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Clemens Krauss. Sargeant also composed music for modern dance groups and orchestrated Broadway shows, turned to critical writing at the Brooklyn Eagle, TIME, LIFE, and, in 1949, The New Yorker. Last week, at 68, Sargeant announced that at this season's end he will give up his aisle...