Word: virtuoso
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...room--its door is kept locked at all times except when released by a switch from the circulation desk. If a thief should manage to slip a book out of the reading room, he would still have to get it past Mr. Matthews at the outside door. Matthews, a virtuoso bartender in his spare time, is a doorman in the grandest manner, complete with English accent. Since the Library's opening, he says he has only had to stop one person--a freshman who wandered out absentmindedly with a rare book in his hand...
...organization, and Conductor Munch was a descendant of a distinguished line of "permanent" conductors. Founder Higginson believed that "the essential condition for a great orchestra is stability." Over 68 years, only nine men had shaped and polished the Boston Symphony until it was-except for Arturo Toscanini's virtuoso radio orchestra, the NBC Symphony, which is in a class by itself-the U.S.'s finest and one of the top four in the world...
Muck's successor, Pierre Monteux (now the San Francisco Symphony's conductor) let it sing modern music-Stravinsky, Falla, Honegger, Milhaud. Then, in 1924, began the 25-year reign of Serge Koussevitzky, onetime bass-viol virtuoso and one of the great conductors of his time. Under his stern but benevolent rule, the Boston had come to a peak of polished perfection, and U.S. composers, subsidized and encouraged with commissions, had found a new home...
Almost totally blind, Tatum is generally acknowledged as the most brilliant technical virtuoso of the jazz piano. A musician's musician, he has been praised by such men as Paul Whiteman ("Tatum is a genius") and the late Thomas ("Fats") Waller ("That Tatum ... is just too good"). He delights in swift changes in tempo and key, becomes so involved in complex contrapuntal rhythms that his listeners are certain he will never find his way out. But he always does...
...opening concert was almost more a tribute to the Orchestra than it was to Munch. It proved beyond question that the Boston Symphony Orchestra lies gleaming in its case like a fine musical instrument, ready to sing in the hands of any great virtuoso. It passes from Koussevitzky to Munch, each with a technique of his own; yet the latent quality of the instrument remains unchanged...