Word: toscaninis
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Every reviewer has his pet theories which he will defend against all comers to the bitter and unreasonable end, especially if they are lost causes. Haggin, for instance, in his zeal for the cause of Toscanini, wrote recently in the "Nation" that he found Koussevitsky's Beethoven and Brahms "impossible to listen to." For the most part, he is a very acute critic, perhaps the most acute, but he has an uncanny nose for the unpopular attitude. When Toscanini was at the height of his glory and powers back in '36, Haggin thought he was a pedantic Italian opera hack...
...Philharmonic's board hopes that Rodzinski will provide the solution of a problem that has vexed Manhattan critics and audiences for six years: how to make the Philharmonic sound like the near million dollars a year it costs to run. Since the great Arturo Toscanini left in 1936 the Philharmonic has slipped from first place to a weak third or fourth among U.S. orchestras...
With the wartime U.S. swarming with refugee maestros, there were plenty of bosses to choose from. Highest on the list of candidates stood: 1) Arturo Toscanini, who for a sufficient fee might have been lured away from his job with the NBC Orchestra; 2) Serge Koussevitzky, who until recently (TIME, Dec. 7) was growing extremely restless in Boston over his union trouble with A. F. of M. Boss James Caesar Petrillo; 3) Sir Thomas Beecham, who has not had a steady assignment in years; 4) Bruno Walter...
...Conductors Koussevitzky, Beecham and Walter were all in their 60s, and Conductor Toscanini was 75. The directors decided on a younger man, hesitated over the name of Dimitri Mitropoulos, glabrous Greek conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony, and finally gave the job to the less brilliant, much tougher, 49-year-old Rodzinski...
...choice of Conductor Rodzinski was probably his reputation as an orchestra builder. In ten years he raised the Cleveland Orchestra from a second-rank outfit to one that threatened to take the Midwest championship from the late Frederick Stock's Chicago Symphony. When, in 1937, Arturo Toscanini wanted a man to assemble and weld to gether the NBC Symphony for him, he picked Rodzinski...