Word: podium
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tuned up and ready to blow, the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington waited on the stage of the austere concert hall at the John F. Kennedy Center. A cheerful cherub of a man walked swiftly to the podium and smiled at the audience. His face was a pale Russian winter's landscape, his blue eyes shone mischievously. He turned toward his colleagues and, with a sturdy slash of his baton, launched into a high-speed, raucous overture that seemed to roil the Potomac. It was strictly show-biz razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical...
...Orchestra, an episodic piece that gave listeners a chance to hear Slava produce his exquisite cello sound, to watch his left hand flick across the finger board, his right arm streak like a bowing jet. Both programs were enlivened by the now familiar spectacle of Rostropovich leaping from his podium to kiss and hug every musician within reach...
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...
Despite such engaging ways, many musicians and critics complain that Rostropovich takes too many liberties with his music, both at the cello and on the podium. Cellist Starker, whose style is considerably cooler and more disciplined than Slava's, deplores -"the personal approach that disregards the composer and stresses the feelings of the individual." It is not that Rostropovich insists upon sending his disregards to the composer; he simply hears phrases, colors and rhythms that nobody else hears. The result is that when he conducts, his soloist's gift for subtlety sometimes deserts him. In Vienna two years...
That purpose is not just to entertain but to address her countrymen during a time of national crisis. It may no longer be possible for the novel to serve as such a podium; too many other diversions compete for the public's attention. But The Ice Age is Drabble's reminder that writers are also citizens of a dangerous, uncertain world, and that social responsiblity need not be parked outside the door of the study. - Paul Gray