Word: musician
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Herbert von Karajan's grace and Zubin Mehta's youth. But when the directors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra cast around for a conductor to save their troubled orchestra in 1968, they threw out all the stereotypes and selected a man who looked, according to one Chicago musician, like a "tennis player or shortstop or golfer" on the podium. He was also bald and aging. Looks aside, Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony were made for each other Together they are producing some of the world's most exciting music...
Solti's love for the orchestra, and its for him, is obvious. "It's a marvelous thing to be musically happily married," he says. "I am and I know I'm a romantic type of musician, and this is a romantic orchestra. That is our secret at a time when everybody is doing exactly the opposite, we are unafraid to be romantic...
Such commonsensical candidness has endeared Solti to musicians; that endearment goes a long way toward explaining his success. Without the loyalty and respect of his musicians, no conductor can long preside over an orchestra-much less produce great music. Musicians are notoriously independent, as the old saw about the French flutist demonstrates. Ordered by a conductor to play in a certain style, the musician said: "Very well, I'll play it his way at rehearsal, but just wait till the concert. After all, man ami, it's my flute." With Solti, it is different. Says Orchestre de Paris...
Under Solti, Covent Garden had its most dynamic presence since the days of Sir Thomas Beecham in the 1930s. Aside from Karajan at Vienna, no other opera house was headed by a musician of Solti's caliber. When he took over, Solti proclaimed that "I have only one desire: to make Covent Garden the best opera house in the world." By the time he left in 1971, he had almost succeeded, and there was no one to dispute his right to the knighthood bestowed by the Queen a year later, shortly after he had become a British citizen...
Sensuality. So popular has reggae become that a movie, The Harder They Come, was made this year about a fictional reggae composer. It is the story of a naive country musician-played by Jamaican Jimmy Cliff-who goes to Kingston, records his song, and is ripped off by the crooked record industry, receiving only $20 for a record that may sell thousands of copies. In many ways, the story parallels Cliff's own early experiences in record making and those of many another native reggae musician. Unlike his screen counterpart, Cliff was never paid for his own first record...