Word: podium
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...pleasant tuning-up hum of the Philharmonia Orchestra faded away and a hush fell over London's Royal Festival Hall. A tall, slightly stooped figure in a frock coat emerged from behind a yellow curtain. Feet dragging, he made his way to the podium with the help of a heavy walking stick. As the applause thundered down, the man's solemn, craggy face remained expressionless and unseeing as a blind man's. Otto Klemperer, 72, painfully mounted the podium, planted his feet firmly apart, and gave the downbeat for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony...
...doesn't conduct like a conductor," a British composer said of him, "but like a man, and a great one at that." Never stooping to showy mannerisms or podium pyrotechnics, Klemperer kept his semi-paralyzed right hand clenched in a permanent fist and conducted almost entirely with his left, pulling the orchestra as if the musicians were marionettes on a hundred invisible strings. With his left hand shaking, soothing, plucking, dancing, he shaped phrases, tossed cues, whipped his men to new intensities. What he did above all was to keep an inexorable grip on the tempo and rhythm...
...paralyzed, speaking with a slur, Klemperer kept hunting for occasional conducting jobs. In 1951, in Canada, he fell again and broke his left thigh bone. Hobbling about on crutches, he still had the will to conduct but not the strength to stand up while doing it. Sitting on the podium before orchestras, he showed his old relentless temperament. One day, while conducting Don Giovanni in Cologne, he was so moved at the crash of trombone chords announcing the arrival of the statue for dinner with the Don that Klemperer spontaneously stood up and once again began conducting from his feet...
...remote and austere figure, he has achieved a unique position in the music world. His trials parallel those experienced by the composer of the "Eroica." Beethoven proved that not even deafness could keep him from composing. Otto Klemperer has proved that not even paralysis can keep him from the podium...
...third of the orchestra was sick at one time, probably with the Eastern malady known as "Delhi belly," but all performed manfully. At an open-air concert in Baghdad, a band of yelping dogs competed so successfully that at the concert's end Dorati fled from the podium in a huff, a case of dogs beat...