Word: toscaninis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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David Fredenthal's Great Fugue was a rhythmic evocation of Conductor Arturo Toscanini in action, and of the music he draws forth. Fredenthal had spent hours in an NBC radio engineer's booth, watching the great man conduct orchestra rehearsals. Toscanini moved too fast to catch in an orthodox sketch, so Fredenthal made multiple-image sketches that recorded a number of recurrent gestures simultaneously. The resulting watercolor bore some relation to Marcel Duchamp's famed Nude Descending a Staircase and some to Gjon Mili's stroboscopic photographs. It had more warmth than either...
Twenty-four years ago, when Arturo Toscanini conducted the world premiere of Giacomo Puccini's unfinished opera, Turandot, he abruptly stopped the show in the middle of the third act-at the point Puccini had reached when he died. In what was to Toscanini a perfectly adequate explanation, he turned to the audience in Milan's La Scala and announced simply, "Here Puccini ended his opera." He refused to go a note farther on that occasion, even though he admitted that Puccini's fellow composer Franco Alfano had done a good job of completing the score. Conductors...
Giuseppe Verdi composed his most fettlesome opera, Falstaff, when he was nearing 80. Last week, white-fringed little Arturo Toscanini, who learned how to play some of Verdi's operas from the famed composer himself some 60 years ago, proved he still had the pep at 83 to conduct a fettlesome performance of Falstaff...
...front of the orchestra. Last week he mounted them on a platform stage behind the orchestra so they would have room to move around in their parts and thus, he hoped, gain greater expressiveness. The stage had to be just the right height, too. After one rehearsal, son Walter Toscanini told Producer Don Gillis: "Father wants the stage maybe six inches higher." Gillis began an impatient reply, finished it with a smile: "Tell father he can-have what he wants, as usual...
This week, listeners will hear the concluding half. The following week, Arturo Toscanini will take his NBC Symphony Orchestra on its first coast-to-coast tour. In six weeks, traveling in a special twelve-car train, they will play in 20 U.S. cities. For his own part in the big tour, a grateful RCA is paying Conductor Toscanini one of the fattest fees in history: an estimated...