Word: toscaninis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Benito Mussolini had dialed in on NBC's short wave lengths last week, he might have heard Italy's greatest conductor direct some uncomfortably prophetic music by Italy's greatest composer. On Arturo Toscanini's Sunday afternoon broadcast, the Westminster Choir boomed cheerfully (in Italian) these words from Giuseppe Verdi's Hymn of the Nations...
Verdi wrote it for an international shindig in London in 1862, when part of Italy was still under the Austrian heel, and he always considered it a musical indiscretion. But Toscanini, who has scrupulously avoided any truck with Fascism, found Verdi's Garibaldian sentiments too appropriate to neglect...
...critics were excited not so much by Conductor Shaw's musicianship as by the way he held the minutest control over his singers. Gesticulating with feverish intensity, Conductor Shaw suggested a cross between Arturo Toscanini and an overwrought college cheerleader. By the time he had finished, a hand-picked audience agreed that his Collegiate Chorale was one of the finest...
...over, Pinza spent a brief spell as brakeman on a railroad, then got a chance to sing King Mark in Tristan und Isolde at the Teatro Reale dell' Opera in Rome. Soon his reputation was made. Arturo Toscanini gave him a contract at Milan's famed La Scala opera house. There the late impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed him for the Metropolitan. Last year, despite the fact that Basso Pinza had his first citizenship papers, the FBI got irritated at some patriotic Italian speeches he had made, interned him, but released him eleven weeks later...
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...