Word: podium
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Career No. 1, conducting, has led him to the podium of almost every major symphony orchestra from Pittsburgh to Palestine. He has conducted Italian opera at La Scala, Schumann in Munich, Bartok in Budapest?each time to cheers. He has just been appointed co-conductor of the New York Philharmonic (with Dimitri Mitropoulos, who is very likely to quit soon). This week he wound up a six-week conducting stint with the Philharmonic that was notable for his unhackneyed programing, e.g., Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Vivaldi's rarely heard Concerto for Strings, Cembalo and Two Mandolins...
...conductor, he made fidelity to the composer his watchword. From the time he first mounted a podium as a "beardless bambino" of 19 (in 1886), no man ever swayed him from what he felt in his heart to be right, but in judging what was right, he relied not only on heart, but on his extraordinary taste and ear. His goal was perfection, and he sought it with the fervor of a knight seeking the Grail. In his own mind he never achieved it, but through the years, his music became ever cleaner and simpler. He was the ever-inquiring...
...right hand stirred in rhythm to the music, then the left hand signaled for expression, finally both arms moved in great sweeping gestures as the old man conducted the invisible orchestra. The dark-eyed, sensuous face lighted once again with the fury and exaltation it had worn on the podium, and the cracked voice rose in frenzy...
...unlike most other concertmasters in the U.S., Polish-born Richard Burgin gets two or three weeks a year on the podium. Last week he led the Boston Symphony at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, in a concert of Vaughan Williams, Beethoven and Shostakovich, which he delivered with craftsmanship and no melodrama whatever. "I know what I want, I know how to tell them what I want, and they give it to me," he said, adding as an afterthought: "just as they give it to any other conductor, only maybe to me a little quicker...
Obviously such a broad new venture would not be without domestic U.S. opponents-whom Nixon, perhaps, was better placed than Eisenhower or Dulles to convince and win over. Even Treasury Secretary George Magoffin Humphrey took to a podium in the Waldorf-Astoria before flying to Paris for the NATO meeting to assert that some estimates of Western Europe's need for new U.S. aid had been "greatly exaggerated. The fact is that in all probability existing institutions will be able to provide most of the assistance that may be needed." But the fact also was that any aid program...