Word: szell
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While any one of the five would no doubt accept an offer from Philadelphia or Boston, each professes to be happy with his current situation. Slatkin cites the example of Cleveland, where George Szell turned a regional ensemble into a crack musical regiment: "If it can be done in that city, it can be done in St. Louis." Adds Simmons: "I'm not even thinking about leaving Oakland. Here, I am able to build something that is basically my own instrument. Why go somewhere else and start over again...
...capable, rather intellectual conductor with an interest in contemporary music, they are versatile and ambitious, but also uneven; they lack a distinct personality. "I would like to give the orchestra an identifiable style," says Marriner. "My ideal would be an orchestra like the Cleveland under the late George Szell, a precise, responsive instrument in which quality, ensemble, intonation are all there." For starters, he is trying to coax more confident, uniform phrasing from the strings and a "rounder, more civilized" sound from the winds, especially the brass...
...musicians are bewitched as much by his personality as by his musicianship. He insists that his players call him Slava, not maestro. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick to bathroom...
...Mengele has found his way into contemporary literature. In Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, he was the model for The Doctor who taunted God to punish him for his killings at Auschwitz. He is the inspiration for the drill-wielding Nazi named Szell in William Goldman's Marathon Man, and the mad doctor who sought to re-create a batch of little Hitlers in Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil...
...brother Doc is involved with Szell, a fact that Babe learns only when Doc comes staggering into his student digs, dying from a crevice that has been carved across his abdominal region. It is not long before Babe finds himself en during the dental ministrations of Szell, suffering horribly while the Nazi per forms some impromptu root-canal work in an attempt to extract information that Babe does not possess...