Word: toscaninis
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Critics looking for the source of Sawallisch's power have found the germ of it in his approach to the music he conducts; like Toscanini, he tries to immerse his own personality in the personality he finds expressed in the score. The process is so absorbing that even at mealtimes he is likely to sit silent, sunk in mental rehearsal of selections from the file of music stored in his memory. He is largely self-taught. The son of a Munich insurance director, he studied piano privately, had only three months' instruction in conducting...
Even before Pinza got out of the army at 27, he won a chance to sing the Count des Grieux in Manon in Rome. After that, his career picked up a dizzying momentum. Toscanini invited him to sing at La Scala, where he scored such a hit in Boito's Nerone that in 1926 Metropolitan Opera Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed...
...overcome Toscanini's dislike of recordings (he was infuriated by their failure to reproduce the sound of his orchestra as he remembered it), Walter Toscanini built a sound studio in the billiard room in the basement of Toscanini's house in Riverdale (the Upper Bronx), piped tape-recorded music up to a giant speaker in the living room. When the spirit moved him, the old man sat in the living room listening to and judging the full-volume thunder of his orchestra. If a note or a phrase displeased him, he moved his head almost imperceptibly from side...
...rest of his performances had to be altered, either by making electronic changes in the sound or by splicing several tapes together. Walter Toscanini collected up to a dozen tapes of each Toscanini-conducted piece, some of them taken at rehearsal, some at the performance, some over the radio by fans. The Maestro listened to every taped version, gave qualified approval to the most acceptable, and indicated what passages from other versions he wanted substituted. In some cases he demanded only one or two inserts. But before he would approve a performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto...
...Maybe." Victor will slowly add the "approved" recordings to its already bulging list of Toscanini disks. (In 17 years of recording for Victor, Toscanini sold better than any other classical artist in history-22 million record units, $40 million in retail sales.) The tapes his father definitely rejected, says Walter Toscanini, will never be released, although they will be preserved at Riverdale as historical documents. But of the 350 hours of Toscanini tapes to work from, roughly half are in a "maybe" category: papa liked them except for minor flaws. Record buyers may eventually hear some portions of them. "Sometimes...