Word: stokowsky
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DIED. Leopold Stokowski, 95, irreverent, in novative conductor whose career spanned 70 years and some 7,000 concerts; of a heart attack; in Nether Wallop, England (see MUSIC...
...Leopold Stokowski...
...hands became a legend, and he kept them in the spotlight, even when his players were in penumbral gloom. In his mind's ear he heard orchestral sounds never made before-and proceeded to make them. "Music appeals to me for what can be done with it," Leopold Stokowski once remarked. By that he meant that he knew better than Beethoven or Brahms how instruments should sound, and that Johann Sebastian Bach surely would have loved his lush orchestral transcriptions of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. For such arrogance-and for the skill with which he argued...
...want to see that chandelier agitated by your emotions," Stokowski once told a standing-room-only crowd of young people at a Saturday evening series to which they swarmed. Supposedly the young groupies, who numbered in the hundreds, lined up at the box office each week at four in the afternoon; by eight, the line trailed blocks away. After the concert, reports one biographer, the youngsters would loiter in the backstage area just to brush the maestro's sleeve as he hurried to his limousine. None of the extramusical sycophancy would have turned Stokowski's head. He was unjustly thought...
History will not call Stokowski a musician's musician. In his heyday, especially, he was much too adventurous with the sacred scores to please his colleagues. He was never afraid to experiment with sound, and was one of the rare few performers who would do so in a concert hall. On one occasion, he added electronic devices to the orchestra, to augment the double basses in a composition that he thought needed an extra heavy bass. Experiments in the association of color and sound that were done early in the century caught Stokowski's fascination. He once used a color...