Word: toscanini
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After 73 minutes of nonstop conducting, Arturo Toscanini looked as if he had just come through the siege of Leningrad. The audience jumped up and cheered, as if it had just heard news of a Nazi defeat. Thousands of radio listeners, who in many sections had fought a losing battle with static, sighed and turned their dials...
...Maestro Toscanini was very well connected. He was connected with National Broadcasting Co., and NBC, it seemed, had been exceedingly forehanded. Last January, before a note of the symphony had been heard in rehearsal in Kuibyshev, NBC started dickering, through its Moscow correspondent, for first Western Hemisphere performance rights. By April the rights to conduct the Seventh were tucked away in NBC's pocket...
...Seventh Symphony and the orchestra to play it, but it was not sure it had the conductor. Both Toscanini and Stokowski are under contract to NBC next winter, but next winter is a long way off. Maestro Toscanini might conduct the musical scoop this summer, if he liked the score. (But four years ago he had been offered the first performance of Shostakovich's Fifth, and declined.) So the photostat pages of the score were rushed to Toscanini, and NBC held its breath. He looked, said: "Very interesting and most effective." He looked again, said: "Magnificent...
Leopold Stokowski, who had hopefully dashed East from Hollywood, went crestfallen back to the West Coast; Rodzinski had not even had a lookin. Hurriedly NBC augmented its Symphony Orchestra to the extra-large size the performance required. Night after night, nearsighted Maestro Toscanini, who conducts from memory, never from notes, sat up with his nose buried in the score...
Yesterday's radio performance of Dmitri Shostakovitch's Seventh Symphony had every prospect of being one of the greatest occasions in musical history. The composer was considered the best living symphonist, the orchestra was first-rate, the conductor Toscanini, and the audience immense. With Germany and Russia locked in a death-grip from Leningrad to the Black Sea, and the music fresh from the pen of Russia's Composer Laureate, the event had tremendous news value...