Word: wolfgang
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Since Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner began redraping Grandfather Richard's operas in modern scenic dress seven years ago, première audiences at the Bayreuth Festival have usually focused more on the props than the performance. But last week at the festival's curtain raiser-a new Wolfgang Wagner production of Tristan und Isolde-all ears were sharply tuned to the sounds coming out of the concealed orchestra pit. There Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, at 34 perhaps the most gifted German conductor to emerge since Herbert von Karajan and the youngest ever to conduct at Bayreuth, was making...
Flaws & Cheers. If the production itself was undistinguished (marked, said Wolfgang Wagner, by "objective sobriety"), the first yearning sighs of the orchestral prelude left little doubt that this Tristan was in expert hands. Dressed in tuxedo trousers and open-throated shirt, Conductor Sawallisch led his orchestra through a performance marked by a water-clear sense of orchestral relationships and rock-sure control. He attacked at a slower than usual tempo, underscored the sensuous quality of the music without letting his orchestra wallow in it. There were the usual first-night flaws. During the second-act love duet, the word...
Heavenly Echoes of My Fair Lady (George Feyer, pianist; Vox LP). Pianist Feyer gives the familiar songs the treatment they might have received from such squares as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff. Frédéric FrançoisChopin, Giuseppe Verdi, e.g., Get Me to the Church on Time as a victory march from a Verdi opera. One of the cleverest parodies since Alex Templeton took Johann Sebastian Bach to town...
...occasion: Florence's Maggio Musicale. In charge: eccentric, peripatetic Conductor Artur Rodzinski (born a Pole in Yugoslavia, he is a longtime U.S. citizen, now lives in Italy). Among leading singers: Swedish Soprano Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Cleveland's Mezzo-Soprano Grace Hoffman as Brangane, German Heldentenor Wolfgang Windgassen as Tristan...
...Wonderville Susan met droll, cantankerous Mr. Pegasus, whose elaborate Cartoon-a-Machine grunted out a canned Terrytoon. In the Foolish Forest she met an all-animal orchestra which included Wolfgang, the violin-playing bear, flop-eared Gregory, the rabbit flutist, and Bruce, the world's only drum-beating gopher-all ingeniously manipulated by wires backstage. Pegasus baited the conductor, Caesar P. Penguin: "He's the world's worst orchestra leader." Said Caesar: "This is not kind. In fact I am going to take umbrage; sometimes I have a headache and I take umbrage." While Caesar took umbrage...