Word: conductor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nary a tympanist, trombonist nor tuba player in the San Diego Youth Symphony complained of not being able to follow the leader. For the guest conductor wielding the baton in three Strauss pieces was 6-ft. 11-in. Bill Walton, who is supposed to be playing roundball crosstown with San Diego's Clippers. Though Walton once tootled an earnest baritone horn in junior high school, his symphony appearance signaled no switch in careers. It simply meant that the Youth Symphony, raising funds for appearances in Europe later this year, recognized that Walton on the podium is as crowd-pleasing...
Haydn: The Seasons (Soprano Ileana Cotrubas, Tenor Werner Krenn, Bass Hans Sotin, Brighton Festival Chorus, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Antal Dorati conductor, London; 3 LPs). This is Haydn's other major oratorio, structurally less cohesive and dramatically less powerful than The Creation, but a work in which the aging composer set out to demonstrate all that he could do in a wide range of styles and forms. In other words, a compendium of glories. The text, from James Thomson's panoramic poem written in 1730, inspires passages of musical landscape painting, evocations of the hunt, human scenes of yeomen...
Krzysztof Penderecki: Violin Concerto (Isaac Stern, Minnesota Orchestra, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conductor, Columbia). Stern could easily coast along on the war horses of the repertory, so more power to him for continuing to stretch himself in challenging new works. This somber single-movement piece, composed for him in 1976, is less abstract, more late Romantic, than the experiments in shifting sonorities that made Penderecki's name in the 1960s. Over brooding drumbeats and pedal tones, Stern gets a virtuoso workout in involuted runs and dissonant double-and triple-stops. But what stays in the mind is the sustained, eerie high...
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conductor, Angel). Mussorgsky-Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition. Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite, 1919 version (Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conductor, Angel). Now that Muti has been appointed to succeed Eugene Ormandy in 1980, listeners will turn to these, his first discs with the orchestra, to see what kind of new leader the Philadelphia has. They will find few conclusive answers. These are unexceptionable performances, clean and firm-if anything, too firm in the emphatic attack in the Beethoven and the clipped chords of the Mussorgsky and Stravinsky. What is missing...
Joseph Silverstein, concertmaster and assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led members of the orchestra in a musical tribute to Fiedler, playing works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart during the service...