Word: toscaninis
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...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...
Stocky, shrewd Xavier Cugat's secret lies not so much in the importing as in the processing of his hip-cajoling products. A master showman, on state occasions he waves a baton three times as long as Toscanini's. He dresses his men in lustrous Cuban silks and colored lights. His music, tinted to the romantic debutante's taste, features Latin violins rather than brasses. It contains just enough subtle tropical pounding and gourd rattling to give it pith, not enough to ruffle the polite suavity of an expensive hot spot. Four weeks ago Cugat added...