Word: stokowskis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last July, before Maestro Leopold Stokowski took his All American Youth Orchestra on a good-will tour of South America, he let it sound off to hot-weather audiences in Baltimore, Atlantic City, Manhattan. The So-odd youngsters (with a backbone of 18 Philadelphia veterans) sounded good, but some critics reserved judgment. Last week, back from the tour, Dr. Stokowski with the Youth Orchestra put on a show in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall itself and put their reservations to rout. Concertgoers were somewhat startled to see the orchestra framed in a brash, blue acoustical shell, lit by brash, blue...
Conductor Stokowski, as mettlesome a showman as he is a musician, gave Manhattan (and, on later nights, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia) a spine-tingling program. His white hands and fuzzy platinum hair gleaming like an oriflamme, he led the youths through a spirited charge on Bach. The violins, on their feet and playing as one man, rattled off one piece, a Preludio, so brilliantly that the audience roared bravos. After the Bach came the Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, melodiously and pompously hymning the Bolshevik October Revolution. By strictest Carnegie Hall standards, the cheers showed that the Youth Orchestra had passed...
...gathered 60-odd youths and 20 maidens he had picked for his Youth Orchestra, started rehearsing them night & day, at $50 apiece a week. Atlantic City's Mayor Thomas D. Taggart Jr. gave them free lodgings at the city's swankest hotels. To season his unbaked orchestra, Stokowski added the merest pinch (18 men) of experienced Philadelphia Orchestra men, thus reducing its 100% U. S. content by about 1%. By the time he was through rehearsing he had fired a couple of woodwinds, had cajoled, scolded, flattered the rest into efficient adoration. To thank Mayor Taggart...
...concert. Five thousand sunburned boardwalkers listened, quietly sweating in the municipal Convention Hall. As the healthy-looking, white-clad youngsters swung into a tricky Bach Fugue in G Minor with veteran ease, many of the audience began to think they sounded remarkably like an outfit they had heard before: Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra. What with pretty blondes, earnestly tooting their trombones and horns, they looked very different. The 14-year-old Negro Trumpeter William B. Homer (TIME, June 24) took his high notes like John Peel...
...time the orchestra had finished Brahms's First Symphony, the audience was well away. Only once or twice did the youngsters wobble a little. Critics were inclined to put down a good deal of their oomph to Stokowski's credit. But as .they packed up their fiddles and horns to start their tour of South America, via Baltimore, Washington and Manhattan, even the severest critic had to admit that Leopold Antony Stokowski in two small weeks had whipped together an orchestra that could already claim sixth or seventh place* among the 17 top-flight symphonies...