Word: toscaninis
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Conductors, like all musicians, are often branded with easy epithets that distort far more than they illuminate. Detractors of Toscanini claim, "He is too fast, too harsh--though great at Verdi," which ignores the intuition behind his intensity. Klemperer is overly eulogzed as "the Olympian, interpreter of the classics." And too often it is said of Charles Munch, beloved as he is, that "he does well only in French music." Friday's contert clearly belied this cruel simplification. Choosing three of his favorite works--by Elgar, Martinu, and Saint-Saens, Munch displayed powers of drama and orchestral coloring over...
Died. Gino Prato, 64, former Bronx shoemaker who in 1955 briefly became TV's top-rated star on The $64,000 Question, when he correctly identified the opera with which Toscanini made his operatic debut (Aida) for $32,000, then declined an all-or-nothing chance at the jackpot, after which he became a $10,000-a-year good-will ambassador for the Biltrite Rubber Heel Company; of cancer; in Miami...
...Norwegian-Americans. Yale-educated Congressman John Lindsay Republican candidate for mayor, made it sound as if Columbia had been his alma mater all along. "Saying that Columbus did not discover America," declared Lindsay, "is as silly as saying DiMaggio doesn't know anything about baseball or that Toscanini and Caruso were not great musicians." Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose son, Steven, has a Norwegian wife, at first voyaged rather bravely into the controversy: "As far as the impact of Columbus' voyage is concerned, he discovered America." Later he carefully added that he did not mean to take anything away...
Wall-to-Wall Strings. In those 30 years, the orchestra has been famed for "the Philadelphia sound." What exactly is that? Very simple, says Ormandy: "It's me! My sound is what it is because I was a violinist. Toscanini was always playing the cello when he conducted, Koussevitzky the double bass, Stokowski the organ." Ormandy plays one big lush violin. His music is coated with the satiny sheen of wall-to-wall strings, a sound that readily lends itself to the works of the romantics-Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Debussy, Brahms...
...Arturo Toscanini firmly believed that "the vibrations of high notes beating frequently on a singer's brain make him stupid...