Word: stokowsky
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Last week in Philadelphia, Violinist Krasner and white-haired Conductor Leopold Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra gave Schönberg's Violin Concerto its first public hearing. While the aged Academy of Music's Friday-afternoon audience sat quietly from force of habit, Louis Krasner fiddled so hard he nearly dropped his bow. The bewildered audience couldn't tell whether all of Schönberg's "unplayable" notes were being played or not. When it was over, the orchestra looked embarrassed, the audience, impressed by an obvious feat of strength and skill, drowned...
...left the theatre in a condition bordering on nervous breakdown. I felt as though I had been subjected to an attentat, to an assault, but I had no desire to throw myself in adoration before the two masters [Disney and Stokowski] who were responsible for the brutalization of sensibility in this remarkable nightmare. . . . A supreme insult to the composers. . . . The perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race turned into black magical destruction. ... If the man [Beethoven] who turned against Napoleon had lived to see the inside of a Nazi concentration camp his torturers might have driven...
Eugene Ormandy is regular conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and last month signed a new five-year contract with it. But Leopold Stokowski is still its occasional conductor. Last week he was in Philadelphia for one of his brief stints on the podium. As always, he made news...
Feature of Stokowski's return was the first performance outside Russia of the sixth and latest symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, at 34 the No. 1 Soviet composer. The Philadelphia Orchestra got first crack at No. 6 as it might have arranged for a ton of caviar: by negotiating with Amtorg Trading Corp., paying a fee so stiff (amount kept secret) that it had to be specially approved by the Philadelphia Orchestra directors...
Long before Fantasia was finished, expenses began to mount, and fellow Hollywoodians began to whisper again about "Disney's Folly." With $200,000 spent on Stokowski's fancy recordings, and a technical bill that overtops Snow White's, the total figure for the production amounted to $2.250.000. Because Engineer Garity's new sound mechanism is so complicated and expensive, only twelve theatres at a time will be equipped to show Fantasia, and RCA sound-equipment manufacturers figure that it will take several years before small-town cinema houses can get the gadgets to perform...