Word: stokowskied
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...command performance by C.P.E. Bach for Frederick the Great. The assemblage of 153 guests was celebrated and varied. Not a single blue-ribbon American composer of serious music, from Aaron Copland to Alan Hovhannes, was missing from the guest list. The nation's leading conductors -Bernstein, Ormandy, Stokowski-were represented in white tie and tails, and all of the major music critics of New York and Washington were eagerly present. Said one: "The composers acted and talked like poor country cousins who had at last been let in the front door...
Walker has admirably avoided transcriptions from other mediums, but the one he did choose showed just how bad the results of such adaptations can be. This, a Toccata, was written by Frescobaldi, but you wouldn't know it from the transcription. Like Stokowski's orchestral renditions of Bach organ music, the adaptation turned the freshness and grace of the 17th century toccata into trite 20th century melodrama. Walker added to the distortion by twisting the evenness of the melodic lines with Romantic nuances...
...neck with slender, manicured hands. Edge really goes for hands-only last year it disposed of a sadistic multiple strangler called Big Frank, who had an enormous pair of them. For his services to soap, Big Frank's hands were cast in plaster as if they were Stokowski...
...Wagnerian romanticism. But the work was, in fact, only a massive monument to a musical tradition about to decay. After it, Schoenberg was to begin the experiments with atonalism that eventually determined the direction of 20th century music. Once popular in Germany, Gurrelieder had its U.S. premiere under Leopold Stokowski in 1932, has rarely been performed since. Last week at Carnegie Hall, still on the crutches he has used since he broke his hip, Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in a fine performance of Schoenberg's fascinating failure...
Originally, Schoenberg scored Gurrelieder for four choruses, five solo voices, and a greatly augmented orchestra, including four harps and a celesta (in last week's performance, Stokowski managed with a standard-sized orchestra and only one choir). All this musical effort supports a series of songs linked by orchestral interludes and based on a medieval Danish story somewhat similar to the Tristan and Isolde legend. King Waldemar has married for political reasons but continues to pine for the Princess Tove. to whom he has presented his castle at Gurre. Tove is put to death by the queen, and Waldemar...