Word: stokowskis
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...Philadelphia two months ago a great outcry followed Leopold Stokowski's announcement that at the next Youths' Concert he would play Soviet Russia's ''Internationale." The American Legion publicly protested. Broker Francis Ralston Welsh, rabid antiCommunist, called Stokowski a Red. William Curtis Bok, the Orchestra Association's vice president, tried to smooth things over by saying that he thought Stokowski would change his mind, that "it was probably just one of those things that pop into his head...
...last week Stokowski did not change his mind. He played the "Internationale"' and invited the youthful audience (aged 13 to 25) to sing it. Some stood up and hummed haltingly along. But no tempest broke. Stokowski had outsharped his critics by having the words printed in French because, he said, he had been "unable to find an adequate English translation." The translation which Stokowski found unsatisfactory: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation...
Conductor Leopold Stokowski's worst enemies grant him his tremendous enterprise, his gift for dramatically making the most of a bad situation. Stokowski's hand was seen in the promise to give new as well as standard operas, in the report that there would be double-cast experiments presenting comely actors on the stage while the voices of expert singers would come from behind the scenes by electrical transmission. Such ventures require money and Stokowski's Orchestra has had trouble enough paying its routine way this season. Most Philadelphians felt that they had Mary Louise Curtis...
...dark suspicion. They were tired of guest conductors and this one was a pianist. But José Iturbi also used to be a boxer and he would not be glared down. He smiled a disarming smile and set the musicians to work with the authority of their own Stokowski.*Before the rehearsal was half over every last one of them knew, that the little Spaniard on the podium meant business...
...each phrase and nuance. First thing he did was to reseat the orchestra, putting the first violins on one side, the second violins on the other, to hear two distinct voices instead of one massed tone. Next he instructed the fiddlers to make their bows move as one, whether Stokowski fussed about such things or not. The Mozart-Kleine Nacht Musik started off too delicately to suit him. "Excuse me," he shouted. "It is too fairy. Mozart was very man." He imitated perfectly the sounds he wanted from the English horn, the double bass, the flute...