Word: stokowsky
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...orchestra to tune up. Then, from a double door, the frail, stooped figure began a slow walk to the podium, his right hand gripping a sturdy cane, his left on the shoulder of an associate. Carefully, the old man settled into his tall chair. At age 94, Conductor Leopold Stokowski was ready last week to cut another record...
...October 1917 that Stokowski made his first recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Those were the days when the musicians gathered in front of a big acoustic horn and played into it. With the advent of electrical recording less than a decade later, Stokowski and the Philadelphia began a series that remains a landmark in quality recording. Then, as now, the Stokowski style is unmistakable-the lush violins, the burnished double basses, the biting brass, the luxuriance of the total sound...
Probably even Stokowski does not know how many hundreds of recordings he has made in the years since, but one thing is certain: no conductor has ever been so active in the studios past the age of 90. Four years ago, Stokowski gave up the leadership of his American Symphony Orchestra in New York and moved once and for all to his native England. "I spend my days studying the scores of the great masters," he says. "Except when I am sleeping, I am thinking of the next time I must conduct great music." Any number of vital, energetic albums...
...June Stokowski signed a contract with Columbia to make four records a year until 1982, when he will be 100. He has already taped some Tchaikovsky for Columbia and an album of his own transcriptions of Bach and Chopin. Last week's session with the National Philharmonic was devoted to Bizet's Carmen Suite. It is a work familiar to both conductor and orchestra, but still excitement ran high. Stokowski's fabled white mane is now a bit thin and shaggy, but the long, tapered hands still work their expressive magic. So does his pinpointing look...
Poor old Mussorgsky: Rimsky-Korsakov doctored Boris Godunov almost beyond recognition, Stokowski mauled A Night on Bald Mountain, and now Tomita has repainted Pictures. It is a marvel that the original music has the strength to stand up to this kind of dilution, like a good Scotch to soda. Tomita's Pictures is no threat to Sviatoslav Richter's classic version of Mussorgsky's piano original, or the Toscanini interpretation of the expert Ravel orchestration. What Tomita does is pop art pure and simple. It is benevolent caricature, a funny-paper treatment of the classics for those...