Word: szell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EVERY obituary writer, and every music critic, in this country has by now observed that John Barbirolli and Goerge Szell were polar opposites. While Barbirolli was the actual successor of Toscanini in the New York post, Szell was, in a very real sense, his spiritual successor. Toscanini and Szell were cut from the same cloth: men of precision who held tight rein over their orchestras and insisted on perfection in their performers. Like Barbirolli, Szell was a distinguished soloist in his own right. To a far greater degree than Barbirolli, he pursued his career as an instrumentalist all his life...
Many a first-rate pianist has taken up conducting as a career. For Leonard Bernstein, the late George Szell and Daniel Barenboim, it was largely a matter of having a large and effusive talent-or sheer ambition-that simply had to spread into other fields. When Pianist Leon Fleisher took the podium last week at Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, however, it was a case of dire necessity. Though he was once the foremost pianist of his generation, his right hand has been partly crippled since 1965, and he is trying to establish himself in a new career...
...Mozart. Szell's demand for perfection from himself and his musicians grew from a lifelong, almost superhuman, discipline. A child prodigy, he could sing some 40 folk songs in four languages at the age of two. He could also scribble musical notations, he liked to recall, "that made no sense at all. That's the way the modern composers do it today." At four, he was slapping his mother's hand when she hit a wrong note on the piano...
...being called "the new Mozart" and regarded with awe by his classmates. One of them, a skinny twelve-year-old named Rudolf Serkin, stole some of Szell's compositions from a piano and practiced them furiously to play for Szell's birthday. Serkin still winces at Szell's uncompromising comment: "Serkin! How can you play such trash?" At 17, Richard Strauss hired young Szell as assistant conductor at the Berlin State Opera...
Died. George Szell, 73, conductor of Cleveland's orchestra (see Music...