Word: toscaninis
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...Seven seasons under the pleasant direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos dimmed its luster, with audience, musicians and critics all bickering over the orchestra's wayward course. When Bernstein took over in 1958, the Philharmonic began to recapture the audience that it had not had since its "Golden Era" under Toscanini in the '30s. As the only American-born conductor of a major U.S. orchestra, Bernstein brought the Philharmonic new esprit and quieted its cranky audience. But soon his St. Vitus conducting technique upset even his fans; to many of them, he seems to be much better at conducting...
...long, cool look at conducting," he says Of course I liked the power and prestige being a conductor- but did I really have anything to say?" After deciding that he did, he began to build his new career, using as touchstones his La Scala debut (". . . the finest since Toscanini, icy told me . . .") and his debut at Bayreuth the Teutonic holy of holies. I was the first American and the young est man ever to appear there," Maazel says, and it was beautiful." Soon he was second only to Herbert von Karajan as Europe's darling. And having triumphed over...
...many a casual concert goer, the name Claude Debussy suggests a moody, vaporous music of almost monotonous sweetness and grace. Anybody who ever sat down to a piano lesson has tinkled through Clair de Lune, and since the great Toscanini performances of the 1930s, it has been almost impossible to get through a concert season without at least one rendering of that virtuoso war horse La Mer. But there is another view of Debussy-one that audiences are being reminded of more and more often in the centennial year of his birth. Debussy was in fact, a revolutionary...
Compared with conductors of the Koussevitzky-Toscanini generation, Markevitch pointed out, the modern conductor has far less rehearsal time and about four times as many concerts to give each year. To combat the fatigue of traveling, he must build "the body of a conductor. One's body must be completely independent of the music." His own body, Markevitch boasted, has become so independent that "at the end of a symphony. I'm breathing at the same rate as at the beginning...
...feels that his playing has become considerably more relaxed than it was when he was on the concert stage. Much of the rest of his time he passes listening to an immense record collection-his most recent interest is in old opera recordings-or playing canasta with his wife. Toscanini's daughter Wanda. He plans to make more records for Columbia. "Since I don't appear before the public now," he says, "I want to make each record like a recital; I want to give lots of styles, music from different centuries...