Word: swoboda
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...heavily sugarcoated, tasted stale. The third movement, "Song," and the dance in the fifth, however, showed the better side of Kodaly's talents; in the third, the viola (Jean Quillen) played a delicate folk melody to a harpsichord accompaniment. The orchestra handled its end of the music superbly. Swoboda again put on a show, and the audience loved...
...used to be. A century ago, according to the minutes in the Harvard Archive, the conductor needed to impress "on this Society the necessity of minding the pianos and fortes which have always been treated with more or less contempt in this Society." Not so Friday evening: Dr. Henry Swoboda, in his first Cambridge appearance, and a new, bigger-than-ever HRO, gave their audience the sight and sound of a professional symphony orchestra...
...could remember the HRO emitting before. Difficult transitions--full orchestra dropping away to unveil a quartet of woodwinds--passed in untroubled succession. Massive string sections--nine violas and eleven cellos--luxuriated in lush tone. A fine solo on the English horn by Barbara Cohen introduced the second movement. And Swoboda provided the histrionics on the podium that are among the reasons for going to a good symphony orchestra...
...Swoboda made up for the rather overwhelming Giannini with a clear, clean interpretation of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony. Swoboda took the opening Allegro moderato at a leisurely, though defensible, tempo, modifying it as the music demanded. Michael Brenner, clarinet, and Barbara Cohen, oboe, reflected musical thoughtfulness and care in their solos opening and ending the second movement...
...When Swoboda says that "music is not a sideline for me...it is my life," the statement is not just a sentimental wandering. For he goes on to point out that people's absorption with a particular art changes often. He speculates that "the modern man is maybe more functional" and so requires the physical presence of painting and architecture. But for many others music is the most compelling art because it is more a human companion than a functional one. He observes further that today both painting and music have become abstract and act as one's continual surroundings...