Word: wagnerities
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
However wry Roth is, baseball is a religion in this novel. A ghostly past of Mel Ott, of Honus Wagner, the Folo Grounds, Kenesaw Mountain Landis -- it haunts this book. To Word Smith, it fled with America's innocence. In the bleachers at Fenway the other night, thinking of this, and badly shaken by the rendition of "Knock Three Times" that had just been piped to us at a deafening level, the kid in front of me with the baseball cap began loudly to taunt the center-fielder with the ageless imputation that he bit the dust. This convinced...
...level of $7 million, and last year's deficit was a mere $74,000, lowest since the pre-crisis year of 1963 Last week, the city's music lovers were crammed excitedly into Orchestra Hall for Solti's concert performance of Act III of Wagner's Die Götterdämmerung They witnessed a true musical event. Tenor Jess Thomas died magnificently as Siegfried, and the audience could almost feel the flames as Soprano Helga Dernesch submitted herself to Brünnhilde's immolation. It was a remarkable performance, a fitting finish to Solti...
Romantic for Solti means a predominance of German and Austrian music (ranging all the way from Haydn to Wagner, Mahler and Strauss), plus an orchestral tone that is big and red-blooded but not as luxuriant, say, as the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. As much as he relishes the Sequoia-like majesty of the Chicago's brass section, and its evergreen forest of strings, Solti is equally partial to the meadowed tranquillity of the wood winds. The delicate lyricism he conjures up between oboe and English horn in the pastoral movement of Berlioz's Symphonic Fantastique would...
...than it actually is. "The things that intrigue me are how to make forms clear," he says, "how to hold a movement together, or if I am conducting opera, how to build an act or a scene." These are traits that produce masterfully cohesive performances of old masters like Wagner, or such Angst-prone post-romantics as Mahler and Bruckner. It was Mahler's craggy Fifth Symphony that gave Solti and the Chicago Symphony the first chance to demonstrate their extraordinary combined talents to New York audiences. So stunningly powerful was their 1970 performance in Carnegie Hall that...
...later he conducted the London Philharmonic, and in 1952 he moved from Munich to become general music director of the Frankfurt Opera. He had nine good years there (44 new productions), but in terms of his international career, it was records that brought him prominence. His 1957 recording of Wagner's Die Walküre with Kirsten Flagstad, Set Svanholm and the Vienna Philharmonic, was so successful that it prompted English Decca (London Records in the U.S.) to engage him to embark upon the complete Ring cycle, a prodigious undertaking that was not completed until...