Word: toscaninis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Another fine U.S. musical export is the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, now in Europe. Beginning a tour that will include the Continent for the first time since Arturo Toscanini took it abroad 25 years ago, the orchestra got the gladdest welcome and the biggest raves any orchestra has ever had at the Edinburgh Festival. The press was more pro than con. Sample pro: the Manchester Guardian's Neville Gardus noted that the scherzo of Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 4 "received a performance which frankly left me ... speechless with wonder and admiration." Not so pro: John Warrack...
Then Orpheus smashed his lyre to the floor and the orchestra ground to shocked silence. Thus last week did La Scala Baritone Giuseppe Valdengo-sometime (1947-54) of the Metropolitan Opera and a notable Iago in Toscanini's 1947 broadcast of Otello-throw the skids under one of the first operas ever written, Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607). From the wings issued a flying wedge of furies, shades and demons, screaming insults at the baritone, who made a hurried and unheroic exit. Umberto and his lady rose uncertainly as the audience broke into loud jeers, cheers and whistles...
...start a music festival!" is a cocktail-party phrase that carries some of the same heady excitement that "Let's start a magazine!" did a generation ago. In 1953, Jascha Rushkin, a violinist with Toscanini's NBC Symphony, whispered the words into the ear of Metropolitan Opera Baritone John Brownlee. In time, facts were added: 1) some three-quarter million people visit New York's Catskill Mountains every summer; 2) a Catskills civic association pledged to buy $100,000 worth of tickets for a five-week festival; 3) the former NBC Symphony, now famed as the Symphony...
...onstage and no fans, U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy came backstage to insist that the men take off their white jackets. After that they often played in shirtsleeves, delicately abandoning suspenders in favor of belts. In Manila an enthusiast presented them with sport shirts decorated with pictures of Maestro Arturo Toscanini, who trained the orchestra (as the NBC Symphony), and left in the spring...
...even the appearance of Marilyn Monroe made such a hit in Japan. The new, triumphant visitor: New York City's Symphony of the Air, Arturo Toscanini's former orchestra, which has been looking for a job ever since the maestro's retirement. Occupation for the next six weeks: U.S. cultural ambassador abroad...