Word: toscaninis
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...years ago, when famed Maestro Arturo Toscanini held a whip hand over it, the spirited, self-willed New York Philharmonic-Symphony was probably the greatest orchestra in the world. Its master horn and oboe soloists, its violin virtuosi had matched egos with dozens of great conductors, were so finely trained that only the hot lashes of the little Maestro could hold them in line. When in 1936 Maestro Toscanini stepped down from the Philharmonic's podium,* the Philharmonic's board of directors were hard put to find a new conductor sufficiently tough to take his place. After some...
Earnest and anxious to please, John Barbirolli did his best to fill Toscanini's shoes. The orchestra tried to help him by pulling its punches. But before the first season was over, it was obvious even to Carnegie Hall's ushers that the fight was fixed. Box office fell off; even Manhattan's kindest critics began to grumble. Last October the New York Herald Tribune's bumptious new Critic Virgil Thomson called the Philharmonic's playing "logy and coarse," "dull and brutal," said it had "the sombre and spiritless sonority of a German military band...
...sensations, never toured Europe or South America, never made movies or interested himself in international politics. He had stuck in his own Chicago back yard for so long that music-lovers in big Eastern cities nearly forgot about him, certainly never mentioned his orchestra in the same breath with Toscanini's. But Conductor Stock stuck to his knitting, and the Chicago Symphony stuck to Conductor Stock. Its strings and brasses matured like old wine, and the Chicago Symphony developed a subtle bouquet...
...Year later Maestro Toscanini signed a contract to conduct the fledgling NBC Orchestra over the radio...
...mature periods, to observe how he develops in craftsmanship, how compact and close-textured, for example, is the Seventh Symphony alongside the diffuse Second, and how much more purified, without loss of strength, are the themes of the sixth compared to those of the earlier symphony. Saturday night, again, Toscanini is doing (in addition to the Second Symphony) two of Sibelius's better known tone-poems, Pohjola's Daughter and The Swan of Tuonela. This is a chance to hear two shorter masterpieces, each impressive, but in entirely different ways: The Swan being a quiet, meditative mood-piece with little...