Word: swoboda
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Whatever their worth, the orchestra made the best of Ginastera's tricks. The orchestra had a splendid, fat and shiny sound which is distinctly a recent phenomenon. Conductor Henri Swoboda has the orchestra at his disposal, and puts it at the disposal of the music accurately...
Miss Lily Dumont's performance of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto last Friday demonstrated nicely how amatcurish professionals can be. With the collusion of Henry Swoboda's ill-prepared orchestra, she made the Beethoven as uninteresting as Czerny--and sloppily played Czerny at that. From the first, she failed to make notes sound clearly. Sensing that she ought to change the pedal after once plumping it down, Miss Dumont tried to compensate for the lack of footwork by wildly revolving her shoulders. Eventually, when she did clear the pedal, she revealed her right and left hands engaged...
...Swoboda's treatment of Brahms' Symphony No. 2, in D major, was far happier. The symphony, pastoral in mood, abounds in lyrical songs and placid melodies. Brahms provokes these tunes to passion or to jubilation, depending on their humor...
Despite a slightly slow start, the first movement did not drag under Swoboda's baton, and the orchestra produced sounds with shapes totally absent in the performance of the Beethoven. The orchestra had a few problems: the strings sounded a little thin and scattered in the extreme upper register during the fourth movement, while the low woodwinds occasionally picked the wrong notes. But Swoboda and the orchestra did capture the excitement and variety of the larger forms within each movement, and the Brahms, which ended the program, mitigated the effects of the Beethoven...
...performance of the Brahms, Swoboda has shown his capacity to make the orchestra handle difficult material well; if he will now add consistency to such quality, he will make the orchestra worth hearing...