Word: podium
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Striding onstage, shoulders hunched forward, elbows flapping at the side, Prince Charles hair sliding forward over one eye, Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas looks like a big bird impersonating an adolescent. Mounting the podium, this shambling creature bows low-to the audience, to the orchestra-then, in some sort of mystical transformation, comes up a man. With a snap, the backbone locks firmly into place. The right hand is suddenly holding the baton high over the head. Slowly, powerfully, the left hand rises like a warning semaphore. Quickly, precisely, the right hand gives the downbeat...
Steinberg later suffered a mild heart attack and had to give up most of the 1969-70 season; Thomas conducted 34 of the Boston Symphony's concerts and was on the podium at its spring recording sessions. The first results, Ives' Three Places in New England and Ruggles' Sun-Treader, soon to be released on a DGG LP, is 20th century music making at its best. Having established himself as a splendid standin, Thomas was asked to fly to London on short notice in May to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra. He was brilliant, especially in Stravinsky...
...effects. "At the end of last season," he says, speaking of his relations with the Boston Symphony, "when we did the Mahler Ninth, I realized how much I'd learned from them. And as I find out more, I can demand more." But when he reaches the podium there is never any doubt whose will is being done...
...first-rate pianist has taken up conducting as a career. For Leonard Bernstein, the late George Szell and Daniel Barenboim, it was largely a matter of having a large and effusive talent-or sheer ambition-that simply had to spread into other fields. When Pianist Leon Fleisher took the podium last week at Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, however, it was a case of dire necessity. Though he was once the foremost pianist of his generation, his right hand has been partly crippled since 1965, and he is trying to establish himself in a new career...
About ten students went to a counter-commencement in the Yard next to the IAB. About 100 students planned to walk out after Foster's speech, but because the Riverside residents approached the podium at that point, the students stayed...