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Orchestra musicians are bewitched as much by his personality as by his musicianship. He insists that his players call him Slava, not maestro. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick...
...play is not about lesbians, only about the dark, anguishing suspicion in Strindberg's mind that his wife may be one and may have betrayed him with one. In this play-outside-a-play Strindberg (Max von Sydow) is directing a brief one-acter of his own called The Stronger. The actual play that Strindberg wrote is a 15-minute monologue in which a voluble wife tests her husband's adamantly silent mistress...
...Enquist's version the mistress be comes a beer-swigging lesbian, Marie Caroline David (Eileen Atkins), and the wife, Siri von Essen-Strindberg (Bibi Andersson), proclaims her love for her to Strindberg's horror, anger, jealousy and despair. The lines, mean and many, are sulfurous fumes straight from the marriage pit. In much of Enquist's play, Strindberg spews vitriolic putdowns at both women. These speeches are used to indicate the large feminine component in Strindberg's nature of which he was fully aware and which he wished to exorcise through a bludgeoning masculinity...
There is no insecurity in Max von Sydow. He gives a towering performance. In intensity, innate authority and mordant humor, this is acting in the thermodynamic range. Bibi Andersson is pallid by comparison, a picture-postcard beauty who recites her lines without the intent to lacerate-rather strange considering her snake-fanged delivery as a wife in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Eileen Atkins is in Von Sydow's league. She encases herself in a palpable shield of silence and then hurls her lines like javelins dead on the mark...
...norm. Its secret: a short twelve-week season that welds its cast for brief, intense, festival-like engagements. This season began with Luciano Pavarotti in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. Coming up are Jon Vickers in Britten's Peter Grimes and Frederica von Stade in The Barber of Seville. This November the Lyric will mount its first Die Meister singer. For opening night next year, Fox has even hired Broadway Director Harold Prince (A Little Night Music) to concoct a new sauce for that classic spaghetti western, Puccini's The Girl of the Golden...