Word: musicians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...maestro's death, Understanding Toscanini is the most detailed examination yet of the man, his work and his audience. "To study how Americans perceived Toscanini is to study how they perceived themselves," argues Joseph Horowitz, a former music critic for the Times. "As a personality, even as a musician, Toscanini embodied 'self-made' virtues distinguishing the New World from the parent culture of Europe. As the dominant figurehead for Great Music, he furnished proof of New World high cultural achievement . . ." The quality of his interpretations was almost irrelevant; in Horowitz's view, Toscanini and the great American cultural inferiority complex...
...opera house -- and his interest in contemporary music, aside from fellow Italians like Respighi, was almost nil. The famous RCA recordings of the Beethoven symphonies now sound febrile and coarse. Even the conductor's notorious temper and torrents of epithets, which once seemed so romantically apposite -- no musician had really lived until Toscanini called him Porco! (pig) -- come off today as operatic posturing...
...postwar American entertainers, none provoked that question more often than a kitsch pianist with a scullery maid's idea of a regal wardrobe, who for more than 40 years attracted stalwart Middle Americans to romps that he himself once characterized as "just that far away from drag." As a musician, Liberace was a panderer: he edited classics down to four to six minutes because, he said, his audience would not sit still for anything longer. He sang and tap-danced competently, no more. From the early 1950s, when his syndicated TV show appeared ten times a week...
...love it. I just love it. Do you remember White Castle hamburgers? They come frozen now. They come in a box. You pop them in the microwave and then eat them in the bed. Beautiful. They taste just like they did in the street." Given the hour this musician eats, the fuel he takes in is a kind of restorative. With apologies to Count Basie, you could call it Stan's One O'Clock Jump...
Recent famines have spotlighted Africa's woes and the difficulty of providing help. When pictures of starving Ethiopian and Sudanese children appeared around the world, there was an outpouring of aid. Rock Musician Geldof was among the first to become involved in raising money, followed by USA for Africa, an American outfit that produced We Are the World, the smash- hit record...