Word: stokowski
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...time when symphony orchestras are losing their audience, no word frightened the supporters of the Disney Hall more than elitism. It was essential to make a place where both Shostokovich and Shrek could feel at home. Disney, who had Leopold Stokowski shake hands on camera with Mickey Mouse, loved classical music, but he loved the public, too. Gehry's design thoroughly digests the Western architectural vocabulary without quoting literally from it. The free-form silhouette is just right for a concert hall in multimultiethnic Los Angeles, a city that doesn't look to Europe for much beyond designer shoes...
...records were our only means of connection with this world that we couldn't experience live. The advantage in those days was that the records we had were conducted by Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Leopold Stokowski and Sir Thomas Beecham. So although the sound was quite primitive, the tempos were right. These were interpretations that I have carried with me ever since. And I must tell you, in those days I thought it was a good sound--until I went to Vienna...
...moviegoers could not only hear, say, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, conducted by Maestro Leopold Stokowski and recorded in stereophonic sound (then a rarity in film exhibition), but also see it brought to life as a titanic dinosaur duel. A man of artistic ambitions--pretensions, if you will--Disney had a missionary fervor to bring fine music, mediated by his own exquisite middle-brow instincts, to the masses. "Gee," he gushed when he saw one segment of Fantasia, "this'll make Beethoven...
...some are mangled virtually beyond recognition. The first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which normally takes between seven and eight minutes, here is over in less than three. The sole exception is the uncut version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice extracted from the original Fantasia, in which Leopold Stokowski hypnotized an anonymous band of Hollywood studio musicians into sounding just like the Philadelphia Orchestra in its blazingly vital prewar prime. Even the ancient paleo-stereo sound track of that sequence has a raw, visceral impact missing from the glossy digital audio heard elsewhere in Fantasia...
...strains of the closing choral ode. The truth is, the evening was a triumph for Kaplan, whose infatuation with the Second Symphony dates to a chance encounter with the music in 1965. As a young economist working on the American Stock Exchange, he attended a performance led by Leopold Stokowski. "I felt like a bolt of lightning had gone through me," he recalls. "The music just seemed to wrap its arms around me and never...