Word: timpanist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Part I of the Oratorio was suffused with the joy of the Christmas festival. The opening chours exploded with, if anything, too much enthusiasm on the part of the timpanist. An initial nervousness was painfully noticeable in the faulty pitch of the above accompanying the first alto recitative. They recouped somewhat in the first chorale when the double-reed timbre out through the vocal sound easily and expressively...
...exults. "The sounds of today are all percussive-the auto factory, the jet engine." Composers, however, "will give you a new score with new percussive effects and say, 'I've written this down, now you find out how to do it.' That's why a timpanist has to be so ingenious...
...Solti? "Fantastic dynamics. I seldom go to concerts, but you could not pay me to stay away when Solti comes to New York with the Chicago Symphony." More often, Goodman is a flinty patriarch who seems to live by his own view that the conductor is seen, but the timpanist is heard. Mengelberg? "Very quirky and picky. He would rearrange the orchestra when he guest-conducted and put the percussion all the way in front, and then complain that the brasses were too loud." Dimitri Mitropoulos? "He did some very exciting things, but he let the Philharmonic deteriorate...
When it comes to his fellow players, Goodman tends to respect those with the most difficult jobs, starting with his own. "A timpanist is the only one who is always alone." He concedes that the horn is even more difficult than the timpani. "I have never known a French-horn player who was a bad person. He may drink, yes, but he is never bad." Violinists, on the other hand, are "pinheaded, often buffoons and clowns"; cellists are "fanatic about their instruments"; oboists are "arrogant...
When the retirement of Timpanist Saul Goodman was announced by the New York Philharmonic, Conductor Pierre Boulez gave him a watch. That was like giving Soprano Birgit Nilsson a pitch pipe. As head of the Philharmonic's percussion section, Goodman has been keeping time for the orchestra for 46 years. His rolls, ruffs and drags were as familiar and indispensable to Mengelberg and Toscanini in their day as to Bernstein and Boulez in theirs. Goodman's departure this week will terminate one of the longest tenures in the history of American symphonic life. As Philharmonic Snare Drummer "Buster...