Word: sound
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...biggest debtor nation. And banks keep crumbling (120 of them went under last year). This does not mean that we are approaching 1929, of course, but as Lester Thurow of M.I.T. wrote last week, "Farm bankruptcies, financial speculation, nonperforming loans, large potential defaults . . . the echoes of the Great Depression sound louder and louder...
...almost a half-century, the sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Conductor Eugene Ormandy was one of the most gloriously distinctive in music. Inheriting a spirited ensemble from his flamboyant predecessor, Leopold Stokowski, Ormandy refined it until the strings turned to silk, the woodwinds to amber, the brass to gold. If Ormandy's interpretations of safe repertory standards such as Beethoven and Brahms symphonies were not always individual, the ravishing tonal beauty of his orchestra was often reward enough. "The Philadelphia sound -- it's me!" Ormandy said proudly, and it was less a boast than a statement of fact...
...Scala opera house. Muti even voiced the heretical notion that the orchestra should abandon its historic home, the Academy of Music, and build a larger hall, better equipped for television and more acoustically suitable to symphonic music. By the time Ormandy died at 85 last March, the Philadelphia sound he had nurtured for so long had practically ceased to exist...
...jokingly, as "Muti's Moonies." "Muti has been touched by God," says Concertmaster Norman Carol, who has held the post for 20 years. "He has given us all new musical life." Music Critic Daniel Webster of the Philadelphia Inquirer agrees. "Ormandy had an idea of how an orchestra should sound, and he made all music sound the same," he says bluntly. "This orchestra could never play Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven under Ormandy. It always sounded like molasses...
...October's Rigoletto, which adhered rigorously to a new scholarly edition of the opera, or his 1983 Macbeth. This unsmiling view of what were once popular entertainments, steeped in a popular idiom, is at odds with the spirit of the composer he professes to serve. And in recasting the sound of the orchestra in line with today's international ideal -- brighter, crisper, sharper -- he has rendered it almost interchangeable with other crack ensembles, such as the Chicago Symphony and the London Symphony...