Word: toscanini
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...campaign (based on the rhythm of the first four notes), and will probably survive many more. The recent Columbia recording of the Fifth is the most satisfactory to date, Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic giving it a more intelligent and broadly conceived reading than that of the present Toscanini recording wherein the Maestro's excessive zeal transformed the first movement into a severe case of the jitters...
...Studio 8-H in Radio City was designed by engineers and cursed by music-lovers. Built to stifle reverberation, it was acoustically satisfactory for variety shows, bad for symphony concerts. (The best auditoriums allow tones to bound about and scatter until they attain depth, warmth.) Toscanini accepted 8-H uncomplainingly, but admitted it was "too sec." Musicritics complained about the studio's woolliness. Last fall, when Leopold Stokowski took over the NBC Symphony, he balked at playing in Studio 8-H, induced NBC to accept an inconvenient, expensive substitute: moving the orchestra to Manhattan's Cosmopolitan Opera House...
These production men have the same tactile sensitivity to machinery as a surgeon has for muscle and nerve; they can make the machinery and blueprints come alive as a Toscanini brings notes off paper. They do not come readymade; they have to grow up with machines...
Trained in Vienna, the maestro worked under both Bruno Walter and the great Toscanini, before being recommended to the Metropolitan in 1938. After a short period of adjustment, Leinsdorf emerged as a leading man in the company's staff, his versatility being complemented by his understanding and genius for Wagner...
...prized record was the $7 single-sided Sextet from Lucia, sung by Caruso, Tetrazzini, Jacoby, Amato, Journet, Bada. In the hysterical years of World War I, secret service men shadowed non-Germans Leopold Stokowski, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Leopold Godowsky. The conductor-worshiping '205 showed the most extreme faddism ("Toscanini conducting Italian nonsense could pack the hall"). In the late-lamented Flagstad epoch, Tristan & Isolde grossed $150,000 in nine performances, "thereby becoming the greatest 'hit' ever to strike Broadway...