Word: stokowsky
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...dashing, Byronic image was eagerly sought after by many of the important figures in composition and performance. Franz Liszt, devastatingly handsome, was the most famous lover in Europe as well the greatest pianist; women fought over the cigar butts he left on the piano after a concert. Leopold Stokowski, the great conductor who shook Mickey Mouse's hand in Fantasia, used to ensure that the lighting at his concerts highlighted his aquiline countenance and halo of long hair. In short, sex has always sold. What's new is that it is women who are now doing the selling...
What finally explains Cleveland's eminence is the happy intangibles that previously elevated Stokowski and Philadelphia, Karajan and Berlin, and Solti and Chicago to musical supremacy: leadership, talent, discipline and desire, perhaps especially the last. "For musicians there's not much else to do here," Dohnanyi points out. "There's no opera, there's no freelancing; you don't come to Cleveland to enjoy the weather. You come here to play in the Cleveland Orchestra." And play they do, better than anybody...
...engagement is blessed, however, with the crisp, lush American Symphony Orchestra, founded by Leopold Stokowski, who conducted 1940's Fantasia. A different local symphony will play at each stop, one of the nicer goals of the enterprise being to increase appreciation for the nation's orchestras. Stoky would have liked that...
Another irony is that in the '30s, when the repertoire became codified, prominent conductors like Sergei Koussevitzky in Boston and Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia were far more adventurous than their contemporary counterparts. Koussevitzky, the Russian-born bassist turned maestro, commissioned and performed dozens of new works by American composers, and Stokowski routinely surprised his audience with major premieres of challenging works, such as Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck. As the recent history of opera in America has shown, there are large untapped audiences hungering for something new. But as long as symphonies insist on treating their customers to the same...
...protesters felt the sequence ridiculed fat people. Conservationists were appalled at the waste of water in Sorcerer's Apprentice. Fundamentalist Christians bewailed ) the depiction of evolution in Rite of Spring. Antidrug forces suspected something subliminally prodrug in the Nutcracker Suite episode featuring dancing mushrooms. Only Fantasia conductor Leopold Stokowski escaped chastisement, perhaps because he is dead...